Hundreds of people responded at midday on Saturday to a call from the family of Kerman Villate, a 31-year-old young man who was hit by a bouncer in the Mítika nightclub, in the center of Vitoria, and died. “The family has evidence to support that this was not only a brutal attack, but also a cruelly orchestrated one,” said the family, who stressed that “there was betrayal.” A minute of silence was observed for the deceased.
The parents and sister of the deceased young man read a text in Arca Square, in the capital of Alava, to demand “truth and justice”. “In the early morning of February 23, 2025, this happened in Kerman. But the blow could have cost the life of any other person. It could have destroyed another family, another group of friends. This matter goes beyond the pain of this family and concerns all citizens and the institutions that represent them,” they argued in a speech that they also published in writing.
The prosecution and lawyers of the bouncer at the Mítika nightclub who hit Villate appealed in October against the charges against him for an alleged crime of “intentional homicide” or “premeditated murder”, with possible sentences of 10 to 22 years in prison. The prosecutor’s office had already insisted that it was rather a “reckless homicide”. In November, the Alava Provincial Court accepted this appeal and agreed to lower the provisional qualification of the crime. In another parallel resolution, the same court understood that the lowering of the rank also implied a possible much shorter prison sentence and accepted the end of preventive detention. The doorman accused of Villate’s murder was able to leave prison after paying bail of 6,000 euros and having certain precautionary measures imposed. As this newspaper reported, this person did not attend another trial for a minor offense that took place in early December. In any case, the battle to classify the crime as “murder” will be decided by the Supreme Court, since the family still has an appeal to cassation.
At Saturday’s event, the family noted that in the months since Villate’s death, “there has been an interest in spreading distorted versions of an uncomfortable truth.” And they criticized the decisions that led to the guard’s release. “From the beginning, the investigating judge of the case, on the basis of documented evidence, qualified the events as murder. What has changed since then? What happened in the meantime for the Provincial Court, ignoring the solidity of the investigation, to give an incomprehensible turn to the case? The order that the Provincial Court issued lacks the documentary rigor that is due to a decision of this importance”, they lamented.
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