Jorge and Andrés Tirado tried to escape.
When they arrived at the house where they lived in Mexico City, at 113 Medellín Street, on December 16, they found a dozen strangers dressed in black and with their faces covered who immobilized and gagged them.
They dragged them to a room where their uncles, José Luis González and María Margarita Ochoa, were already handcuffed.
They got beat up.
They cut them with knives.
In an oversight of his captors, Jorge untied himself and tried to free his brother as well.
One of the kidnappers, Azuher Lara, kicked him to the head.
She lashed out at him while he was on the ground.
The young man stirred, tried to defend himself.
Lara stabbed him.
"The boy vanished," José de Jesús later confessed,
presumed murderer of Andrés and González and witness to Jorge's murder.
EL PAÍS has had exclusive access to the testimony that the man and another of the arrested women, Rebeca, gave to the police after being arrested.
On December 18, Mexico was shocked by the triple homicide of the Tirado brothers, Andrés (27 years old) and Jorge (34), and their uncle, González (73).
According to the Prosecutor's Office, the three men and Ochoa (75), the only survivor, were kidnapped so that the woman would give up the property of Medellín 113 to her captors, who lived in the same building.
When the police broke into the residence, the bodies were piled up in a small room and Ochoa had been tortured for two days.
First, the agents arrested Blanca Hilda Abrego (64), her daughter Sally Mechaell Arenas (43) and her partner, Azuher Lara (37).
Later, the rest of the alleged accomplices fell one by one: Randy Arenas (23), Sally's son, Rebeca, José de Jesús, Luis and Karla.
José "N" during his detention.FGJ
According to the testimony before the Public Ministry of José de Jesús y Rebeca, there is still one more fugitive suspect.
The private adviser of one of the victims assures that there are at least two others involved who have fled from justice.
"90% of the people involved are apprehended, it can be considered good news, on the family side it was quite good for us," says Daniel Tirado (30 years old), brother of Jorge and Andrés, in an interview with EL PAÍS.
“While I don't really think much about the trial, I hope that the ultimate justice is done anyway.
It is unheard of that they have taken three lives ”, he is indignant.
According to the statements of the two detainees to which this newspaper has had access, José de Jesús and Lara were the material authors of the triple homicide.
The rest of the kidnappers dedicated themselves to robbing the house of any valuable object: telephones, computers, iPads, televisions, cameras —Rebeca confessed to having left the property with Mechaell Arenas to withdraw money from at least three ATMs with the cards they had stolen from the victims.
After arresting and gagging the Tirado brothers and locking them with their uncles in the room, José de Jesús tortured the young men into giving up their bank details.
Meanwhile, he drank alcohol.
"The more he drank he became more aggressive," Rebeca narrates in her testimony.
She, according to her story, could not bear the scene and went to another room,
but through the walls he could still hear the screams.
“Jesus told them: 'Here they are going to be worth a dick, I'm going to kill them'”.
She heard one last howl.
Then silence.
José de Jesús, perhaps somewhat dazed, went to the kitchen.
He drank a juice.
He washed his face in the bathroom.
“After about 15 minutes I came back to the room to see what we were going to do,” he testified.
"I realize that they were no longer breathing, so Azuher tells me that I had killed them and that he had to help them down, that he had thrown one out, but I had killed two."
Mechaell Arenas and Lara then considered dissolving the bodies in acid to eliminate the evidence.
"Immediately, it came to my mind that they were not only going to kill Mrs. [Ochoa], but also me, which is why I help to lower the bodies," continues the statement of the alleged murderer.
Rebeca "N", detained by the Mexico City Attorney General's Office. FGJ / Mónica Gónzalez
They dragged the bodies up the spiral staircase, wrapped in black garbage bags, to a small room they used for storage.
They cleaned up the blood.
They talked about hiring trucks to remove the bodies.
Rebeca began to feel overwhelmed by the situation and asked to be let go.
Lara opposed it, but José de Jesús managed to convince him.
On Saturday at six in the afternoon, he also left Medellín 113. By that time, the disappearance of the Tirado brothers had already been massively denounced on social networks and friends of the young people who were looking for answers gathered at the door of the residence. about his whereabouts.
A few hours later, Lara called to ask for her help moving the bodies.
He refused to go back.
The next day he found out on television about the arrest of his friend.
A few days later, also Rebeca's, who was arrested while trying to pawn stolen objects from Medellín 113. He was arrested on January 4.
an easy robbery
The house at Medellín 113, in the Roma neighborhood, belonged to an uncle of María Margarita Ochoa who died last May.
Blanca Hilda Abrego had lived with him since 2004: she was the old man's nurse, who needed constant care.
The man lived on the top floor of the building, the woman on the ground floor.
Her daughter, Mechaell Arenas, her grandson, Randy Arenas, and, on occasions, Lara, also shared a roof with Abrego.
When the old man died, Abrego tried to get the deed to the house through different tricks, but none of them worked.
Ochoa sensed that something strange was happening with the nurse.
She and her husband, González, stayed at Medellín 113 while they regularized the inheritance of the property.
In August, the Tirado brothers, an actor and a musician, moved to keep company with their uncles, concerned about the tense situation with Abrego and his family.
For several months, they lived under the same roof.
The Tirado brothers and their uncles, upstairs, the nurse and her descendants, downstairs.
When Abrego and his relatives saw that Ochoa was finishing the legal processes to inherit the house, they decided to act.
They started planning the coup in September.
It was at that moment that Lara visited José de Jesús, a friend with whom she had grown up in the Portales neighborhood, to invite him to a “
bizne
” [
business
] that he had in hand: a simple robbery of a house in which They lived "two kids, an older adult and a lady."
The plan, according to Lara, was to enter the residence when its owners were not there.
José de Jesús, after thinking about it for a while, accepted because his economic situation “was not so good”.
"I owed two months of rent, electricity, gas and even in the store."
He talked about the robbery with Rebeca, his ex-partner, who asked him to participate.
He also needed money.
One day before the kidnapping, on Thursday, December 15, Lara notified them.
Rebeca and José de Jesús met around six in the morning on Friday at the Obrera station, got on a bus and got off at the Álvaro Obregón stop, a couple of minutes from Medellín 113. There Lara and Mechaell Arenas were waiting for them with her youngest son, a three-year-old boy who, according to testimonies, was in the house the whole time.
While the victims were tortured, his grandmother Hilda played with him to distract him.
At 11:30 in the morning, Karla, Luis and the other suspect the police are still looking for arrived.
Rebeca and José de Jesús affirm in their statements that they had never seen them, that they met them that day.
The anonymous man, Lara and Luis, who was carrying a weapon, went to look for González upstairs with the excuse that he would move the car so that a technician could check a broken washing machine that they kept in the garage.
They immobilized the man, then called Ochoa to tell him that her husband had been in an accident.
They also gagged her.
The Tirado brothers still took a while to arrive.
The first was Andrew.
José de Jesús, Luis and the other man immobilized him while Karla stole his wallet, telephone, cards, asked him for her passwords and the cash she had in the house.
Jorge arrived a while later.
“He was taller and more robust.
As footsteps are heard on the stairs, this boy turns around and that's when I came out from behind the cupboard where he was covering me and I rushed at him, hugging him and throwing him to the floor, "José de Jesús confessed.
Luis pointed the gun at him.
When, two days later, the police finally entered Medellín 113 along with one of Ochoa's sons, the woman was found tied to a wheelchair and the three men were found dead.
Abrego, Mechaell Arenas, Lara and her three-year-old son, who is now in the custody of another relative, were also at the crime scene.
Little by little, the rest of the alleged accomplices were falling.
Now, in prison, they await their trial.
Sunflowers hang from the door of Medellín 113, four days after the homicides. Marco Ugarte (AP)
subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS México
newsletter
and receive all the key information on current affairs in this country
