Just 38 days after hanging Edgardo Jesús Gabriel Lucero Ramírez (29) to death, this Friday afternoon Vladimir Cristian Cayo (28) heard his sentence: 20 years in prison, an express sentence for a homicide where the clues were everywhere. A handful of people saw him take the body wrapped in a bag from a store in downtown Mendoza.
The crime, which had an express resolution, had begun last Wednesday, December 6, with a search case for a missing person. Lucero Ramírez had left his home in Guaymallén accompanied by an aunt, whom he told that he was going to travel to Palmira, San Martín, to see his girlfriend.
That night, around 23 p.m., he got off a bus and was never seen again. The family filed a complaint the next day and the search began.
However, on Thursday the 7th, Lucero Ramírez was at the Tonsa gallery, a shopping mall on the central Avenida San Martín, in Mendoza. He had gone to a cell phone store that Cayo managed. I wanted to reprimand him for an affair he was having with his girlfriend.
But the fight escalated, and Caius ended up strangling the young man. That was the beginning of the operation to dispose of the body, while his family began to look for him.
He packed the body in a consortium bag and took it away in an Uber that he ordered through the app. He brought it out for all to see. Neighboring merchants even joked, "We were surprised by the size of the bag, it was about two meters. I couldn't carry it because of how heavy it was, so I dragged it along. When we saw him with another merchant friend, we joked that there was a body inside. I never imagined it would be like this until the police arrived. They walked past people as if nothing had happened," a witness told MDZ Online.
In bags and in full view of everyone: from here they removed the body of the young man murdered in the Tonsa Gallery. Capture elnueve.com
According to the same newspaper, among the merchants of the Gallery they knew of a quarrel between Lucero Ramírez and Cayo. "You could see it in the area. We were amazed when it came out in the papers. It was even said that this young man had problems with a dealer in the gallery, but we didn't know with whom," said one dealer.
The bag was dragged to the parking lot, where it was loaded into a white Fiat Cronos that functioned as a ride-hailing app car.
From the gallery they took him to the place where the body was buried, a hidden alley near Cayo's home, located on 2 de Mayo at 10000. He told the driver of the car that it was "a hide" of some animal that he was going to sell in the gallery, but that it did not materialize and he had to take it back to his home.
It wasn't just the neighbors who had seen it. Also the security cameras in the area. Lucero Ramírez entered the Saturno 69 cell phone repair shop at 18:15 p.m. and did not come out again. At 21:14 p.m., the footage showed Cayo and another man pulling out a bundle, which had a striking human shape.
Vladimir Cristian Cayo Coronel, after receiving the sentence (Courtesy of the Judicial Power of Mendoza)
That's why, when the investigators reconstructed the whereabouts and saw the footage, they had no doubts. Added to that was the data from Lucero Ramírez's cell phone, which had been turned off for the last time in the premises.
With that information, Caius broke down and confessed to the crime. He also indicated the place where the body was buried. On December 29, he was unearthed. With all the facts on the table, the murderer agreed through his lawyers to an abbreviated trial, in which he confirmed all the evidence against him.
Collegiate Criminal Court No. 1 sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Before hearing his sentence, Caius apologized to his victim's family. "I accept the charges and I want to apologize to the Lucero family. I'm very sorry for what I did," he said.