Lina is the friend with whom Samuel Luiz was in the early morning of July 3, 2021, when he suffered a brutal collective attack that ended his life. He testified at the third hearing of the murder trial and said Diego MM, the defendant who allegedly started beating him, and his partner at the time, Catherine SB, called the victim a “fucking faggot.” before starting to beat him up. Both, she insisted to the jury, demanded that they stop recording, despite the fact that she and Samuel told them they were making a video call.
Furthermore, Lina contradicted the version given by Catherine SB in her statement, in which she stated that she tried to stop the assault, that she separated Diego MM while he was on top of Samuel, by hitting him, and that she had slapped him to try to make him listen to her. The friend who accompanied the victim, who began crying during her testimony, said they were at the top of the boardwalk bench near where they had gone out and were on a video call with another friend. when they saw some of them, he scolded them and told them to stop recording. Samuel’s homosexuality, he claimed, could be perceived by his gestures, his way of dressing and his own voice, which he described as “soft” and “fine”.
He reported that Diego MM “lunged” at Samuel and others quickly joined him. One of them grabbed him by the neck, he said. She tried to stop the attack and, according to her version, that’s when Catherine SB approached to push her away and told her: “Get out of here, you’re worthless.” She stressed that she was “very sure” that he had told her and not Diego MM, and that his intention was not to “protect” Lina or stop the beating, but rather to allow the victim to continue to receive blows. The attitude was “aggressive”.
Lina said she fell to the ground from the push and that a couple, a boy and a girl who she said she did not remember, helped her up. From there, he saw a crowd of people beating Samuel, who only got out with the help of one of the Senegalese who was trying to help him. At that point, he explained, his friend could no longer stand on his own two feet. He insisted that she try to locate his cell phone and she backed away a little: “We thought it was going to end there.” As he asked for help finding the device, he saw a group of people start running. “I felt they were coming after him again,” he said. Then, she added, she started running too, but when she reached Samuel, he was already lying on the ground, unconscious, with people around him. A man and a woman, he said, were already there and he asked them to call an ambulance.
Video calls
Then, said Vanesa, the friend to whom Lina and Samuel made the video call. She said she saw her friends approach the couple, who waved their cellphones to show her how many people were out that evening. He heard his friends say they weren’t recording and the voice of the man (whom he identified in the room as Diego MM) approached: “Stop recording me, let’s see if I’ll kill, faggot. Then, he said, the camera started “moving really fast” and the only thing he heard were noises and Lina’s voice shouting: “Please leave him alone. he’s my friend. »
The call, as Vanesa explains, was cut off and she was only able to contact her friends again after a few minutes: it was another video call, made again by Lina, in which she saw Samuel standing, clinging to one of the Senegalese who were holding him. They helped him. She heard him ask Lina to look for her cell phone. Her friend, she continued, was “very agitated, crying, like she was having an anxiety attack” and told her that Samuel had been hit. There, Vanesa claims to have seen people running and her friend also going in the same direction. Communication was cut off again and the next thing he knew, again from Lina, was that his friend was “very poorly” and had been taken away by an ambulance.
The two people who tried to stop the attack
During the third session of the trial for the assassination of Samuel Luiz, the two Senegalese migrants who had tried to help the victim that morning also appeared as witnesses. They both explained that they were walking along the boardwalk and saw a group of people hitting a boy who was on the ground. One of them, Ibrahima Diack, explained that he grabbed the young man who was being beaten and pulled him out of the melee. Magatte N’Diaye placed himself behind him to try to stop the group, which pretended to surround them, throwing blows “continuously” at Samuel but also at Ibrahima. “He couldn’t have gone out alone,” he said, later adding that “he couldn’t even defend himself.”
They crossed the street, he explained, to try to escape the attackers, but someone hit Samuel, causing him to fall to the ground. “I was bleeding,” he said. From that point on, according to his account, the attackers quickly dispersed. He and Magatte also left the area: “We were illegal, we had no papers at that time and we were very afraid” (the Government granted them both after their intervention). “I did it because it came from my heart,” he said.
In the room, Ibrahima Diack recognized one of the members of the group of attackers. He pointed the finger at Alejandro FG, known as Yumba. Magatte N’Diaye, however, indicated that he had identified the five accused. Defense attorneys attempted to impress upon the jury that there was a contradiction between this statement and the lineup during which three people were identified.
On Friday, another witness also testified, a young man who was there and saw the beating, Alexandre. He said he saw a numerically superior group hitting someone else. He also said he saw someone with a bottle making the gesture of going to use it to attack and claimed to have heard the sound of breaking glass. Furthermore, it didn’t even occur to him to try to stop the lynching because the level of violence scared him. When Samuel was already collapsed on the ground, he said he approached to try to help him and attracted the attention of a police patrol approaching the scene.
There are five accused of murder. For two of them, Alejandro MR and Alejandro FG, the request is 22 years in prison, while for Catherine SB and Diego MM, 25 years are required considering that there is an aggravating circumstance of discrimination for sexual orientation. For Kaio ASC, the sentence is increased to 27 years because, in addition to murder, he is accused of violent robbery for obtaining the victim’s cell phone.
