A heartbreaking statement. That of the father of a 24-year-old young man who was murdered by a crowd of individuals he did not know during a wild group that struck them in the early hours of July 3, 2021 in La Coruña. Maxsoud Luiz, Samuel’s father, testified this Monday as a witness in the trial for the violent death of his son. In tears, he said “what they loved most” had been taken away from him and his wife. He demanded that “he who must pay pays”, while clarifying that he was not seeking revenge.that he is not a judge and that he does not want to be, and that he was not there “to judge anyone”.
The room of the Provincial Court of La Coruña remained silent before the heartbreaking testimony of Maxsoud Luiz. The five accused of his son’s murder – Diego Montaña, Alejandro Freire “Llumba”, Kaio Amaral, Alejandro Míguez and Catherine Silva – listened to his story with their heads bowed. It is impossible to decipher what the five young people who face sentences of 22 to 27 years in prison for this crime were thinking. Only in the case of the accused Catherine did this serious face turn to tears when Maxsoud Luiz deplored the questions of the prosecutor, Olga Serrano: “They took away the shine that was in us, They took everything from us.”
The accused Catherine Silva, this Monday, at the time of the statement of Samuel Luiz’s father
It was a brief statement, a drink that Maxsoud Luiz wanted to offer “as soon as possible”. This is what he told the magistrate when she tried to reassure him at the start of the hearing: “Take as much time as you need, don’t worry.” “It’s very difficult. The sooner we finish, the better it will be for me,” replied the victim’s father. “How was Samuel?” the prosecutor asked him. Well, among other things, replied Maxsoud, his son, who combined work and studies, was his “best friend”. No one in this life can say bad things about him. “He was a perfect example, inside and outside the house,” » remembers his father, proud.
His son, Maxsoud Luiz said, was always fleeing the fighting. When Samuel told them that he was going out with his friends, he always tried to reassure them, assuring them that he would never “get into trouble.”
That night of July 2-3, 2021, he didn’t get into trouble either, but they killed him for free. He had gone to the Andén nightclub, near Riazor. At closing time at dawn, she left the place with her friend Lina and, on the promenade, they started a video call with another young woman who had not been out that evening. Diego Montaña, who was there with his then-girlfriend Catherine, also accused, thought Samuel was recording him with his cell phone and, after After shouts mixing death threats and homophobic insults, he began to hit him. Llumba, Kaio and Alejandro Míguez, as well as two other young people who, being minors at the time, would have already been convicted of the crime in a separate trial, allegedly participated in the attack. Catherine is not accused of hitting Samuel, but of trying to prevent Lina from helping him. The prosecution attributes the same aggravating circumstance of discrimination, linked to sexual orientation, to her then boyfriend.
“Now’s not the time, Dad.”
This is why this Monday, both the prosecutor and the private prosecutor’s office had no choice but to ask Maxsoud Luiz if his son’s clothing and appearance could lead to the inference that he was homosexual. “A father knows his son and respects his son. One day I asked him about his condition and “The answer he gave me was: ‘Now is not the time, Dad’.” his father explained. The lawyers for the five defendants chose not to ask him any questions.
Maxsoud Luiz’s statement was heartbreaking, but also exemplary. He doesn’t want to be in the spotlight, “nor interviews, nor to be on television.” The only thing he aspires to is to continue his life, with Samuel’s mother, because he has “nothing else”. But Maxsoud Luiz, despite the unbearable pain of losing a son in this cruel way, was able to say, perhaps in an implicit allusion to the parents of those accused of Samuel’s murder: “There are a lot of broken families here, not just one.” “Do your job, do what you have to do, I don’t care who it is, I’m not here to judge anyone,” he insisted in court. Of course, in the last section, there was something that could not be contained: “What they did to my son was hatred. No dog is left lying in a ditch. “They left it lying around.”
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