This Wednesday, a criminal justice judge from Bogotá imposed preventive detention in a detention center on Juan Carlos Suárez Ortiz, one of the two men accused of killing Jaime Esteban Moreno, on October 31. The judge agreed with the prosecutor’s office and the victims’ representative, and noted that Suarez poses a danger to society and is a person vulnerable to failure to appear in the judicial process. He said: “The considerations that were made to plead failure to appear to serve his sentence and consider him a danger to society are completely identical.”
The Tugada argued that Suarez acted with premeditation, with malice and clear intent to kill the 20-year-old student at the University of Los Andes, as well as with contempt for human life and without offering the minimum amount of repentance. He confirmed: “He did not stop the blows even when he saw Moreno drowning in his own blood, his face covered and convulsing, but he returned to kicking him twice more.”
In addition, he expressed that the 27-year-old acted with disrespect for authority and with the intention of evading justice, by fleeing the scene of events “the moment the sirens were heard,” but not before “participating” and even “bragging” about what happened. Suarez is being tried as a possible co-author of the murder and faces 40 to 50 years in prison. At the trial session, he denied the charges against him.
“Keep calm after doing this,” the judge said. “It would be a disastrous and wrong message not to impose a freedom safeguard” and expresses that “society would be in grave danger (…) because (Suarez Ortiz) could face a similar scenario and end someone’s life.” Moreover, he considered that Suarez’s freedom would pose a threat to the safety of Juan David Cárdenas, the friend with whom Moreno left the Before Club nightclub on Halloween night and who had tried to defend him on the night of the events.
The court also stressed that the defense’s arguments always deviate from what has been proven, such as when it claims that the attack on Moreno was not coordinated between two people or that Suarez inflicted “soft” blows on him. For his part, the victims’ spokesman, criminal lawyer Francisco Bernat, said that pretrial detention is the ideal solution.
In a photo recorded by a security camera three blocks from the nightclub, you can see Suarez charging at Moreno as Cardenas tries to stop him. The attacker slams Jaime to the ground and hits him with his fists and kicks. Cárdenas manages to stop the beating, but another man arrives dressed in black and wearing a rabbit mask, who resumes the beating, now watched by a woman in a blue dress, who arrives at the scene. Cardenas tries to defend his friend to no avail. At 3:05 a.m., the attackers and the woman returned to where they came from, while Moreno remained lying on the ground, unresponsive.
Suarez was arrested on the same day of the events along with Caledmar Paula Fernández Solparán, the woman in the blue dress, and Bertha Parra Torres, but they were released without any connection to the operation. Eleven days later, more than a thousand kilometers from Bogota, in the Caribbean city of Cartagena, the man wearing the rabbit mask, Ricardo Gonzalez Castro, surrendered to the authorities. On the same day, the prosecutor’s office charged him with the same crime as Suarez, as the second co-author of the murder. Gonzalez also did not accept the charges.
The Prosecutor’s Office also requested preventive detention for Gonzalez, arguing that his conduct involved fraud and intent to harm the victim, and cited him as a danger to society, in addition to having no roots in the community and intending to escape justice.
The defense stated that the accused had no history of quarrels or quarrels, that he arrived in Bogota from Cartagena, his home country, in December 2024 “in search of opportunities,” and that he surrendered voluntarily. Gonzalez worked at a hot dog stand in the San Victorino sector, in central Bogotá. The hearing to determine whether he will be sent to pretrial detention is scheduled to be held this morning, Thursday, November 13.
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