Luis Alberto Villa Báez (44) was sentenced to life imprisonment accused of being the perpetrator of the femicide of his partner María Luján Alva, the teacher murdered in 2019 at her home in Villa Elvira, La Plata. The sentence was handed down by Judge Andrés Vitali.
At the beginning of the month, the popular jury had found him guilty, after the prosecutor made a representation of the situation in full trial, by placing a noose around his neck and pretending to be the victim, in order to discredit the strategy of the defendant’s defense, which maintained that the woman hanged herself.
During the trial and in front of the members of the popular jury, the technical judge of the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) 3 of La Plata and the rest of the parties present in the room, the prosecutor Victoria Huergo approached a chair placed under a wooden structure with a gallows that had been set up by the defendant’s defense and placed his head to represent the scene in which the victim was found.
Huergo’s action occurred while an expert summoned was speaking to refer to the injuries detected on the teacher’s body and the evidence detected at the scene of the event, with which the prosecution did not agree.
Despite being warned that “for a matter of security” she should not put the noose around her neck and sit in the chair that was under the gallows, the representative of the Public Ministry continued: “Sorry, I’m sitting and I can’t It’s short of breath, and I don’t have any trouble talking and I’m not getting hypoxic.”
The event happened on February 4, 2019 in a house on Calle 79, between 8 and 9, in the Villa Elvira neighborhood, where the body of the teacher, who lived there with her partner, was found.
The man initially declared before the investigations that he found her hanged and that he tried to revive her through CPR maneuvers, although as the investigation progressed the experts revealed that the scene had been altered and that the woman had been murdered.
