The lawyers asked to acquit those accused of cover-up
The defense lawyers of six of the 11 City police officers accused of covering up the crime of Lucas González, the 17-year-old teenager shot to death in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Barracas in November 2021, requested the acquittal of these agents on Tuesday. considering that they had no participation in the event, and some of them formulated harsh criticism of the head of the Buenos Aires force, whom they even blamed for being aware of the maneuvers carried out to cover up what happened.
Before the start of the defense arguments, the lawyer who is acting as a plaintiff for Lucas’s family and that of his three friends, told Télam that he will request “the arrest and investigation of (the chief of the City Police ) Gabriel Berard”, considering that “he could not have been oblivious to the security operation the day Lucas was killed, where more than 800 square meters were fenced off, more than in a Boca-River.”
One of the first to plead was the lawyer Augusto Nino Arena, who defends the main Héctor Claudio Cuevas, accused of cover-up.
In his presentation, the lawyer considered that Berard was aware that what had happened had not been an armed confrontation between Buenos Aires agents and criminals, as the policemen tried to make believe at first, for which they even “planted” a weapon in the victims’ car, according to the prosecutor’s indictment.
“When he declared (the former Buenos Aires Security and Justice Minister, Marcelo) D’Alessandro said that the police chief told him that there was an armed confrontation. Are we to believe that the city police chief did not know anything? Cuevas has him panic for these people, panic for their lives, that of their daughters and wife. Do you really believe that the police chief did not know?” Arena asked the judges of the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) 25, in charge of the debate.
Later, the co-defender and sister of the detainee for cover-up Ángel Darío Arévalo, assured that the officer “did not cover up”, for which she asked for his acquittal, and also pointed to the leadership of the Buenos Aires police: “Lucas’s mother deserves to know the truth, those who are the true concealers of this, are not those of lower hierarchy, but come from higher up”.
The lawyer recalled that after the arrest of her brother, she tried many times to contact the authorities of the City Police, which she was able to do on February 23, 2022, more than two months after the arrest.
“We thought that they were going to give us an answer and the truth is that we found ourselves with the worst thing that can be said to a family at that moment, since the police chief and the deputy chief told us something that I cannot forget, that I cannot get out. from my mind: ‘We know that their relatives are innocent, but we can’t do anything because this is a political issue and we don’t want it to reach us,'” he said.
And he added: “I replied: ‘If you tell me that my brother is innocent, it is because you know who is responsible, to which they looked at each other and said nothing.’ I understood then that we had no one to trust.”
So far in the day of allegations, which continued this afternoon, the defenses of six of the 11 accused of concealment demanded the acquittal, since in addition to the lawyers of Cuevas and Arévalos, those of commissioner Rodolfo Alejandro Ozán, the Deputy Commissioner Ramón Jesús Chocobar, and officers Daniel Rubén Espinosa and Jonathan Alexis Martínez.
Lucas and his friends were attacked with bullets on November 17, 2021 when they left training at the Barracas Central club and were returning home aboard a Volkswagen Suran.
In Iriarte and Vélez Sarsfield, the youths were intercepted by a Nissan Tiida in which three police officers from Brigade 6 of Comuna 4 of the City Police were circulating, who signaled for them to stop.
Since they did not have police identification, the boys thought they might be thieves and tried to escape, at which point the officers fired at them and a bullet hit Lucas in the head, who died the next day at the El Cruce de Florencio Varela hospital.
