You may
remember the case—Georgina Ortiz Ortiz, the wife of an ex-state supreme
court judge, Carlos Irizarry Yunqué, was killed on 17 August 2010 in a fashionable
area of San Juan.
And in what
must have been the most cynical and depraved stunt of the year, the police
decided to go after the maid, despite conflicting evidence of the husband,
despite a witness who said that the photos of the scene didn’t match what he
had seen, despite a bloodstained man’s shirt found in Irizarry’s hamper,
despite the fact that the daughter of the victim had hired a private eye to
follow her mother (so worried was she), despite the fact Irizarry had hired a
detective as well to spy on his wife, despite the fact that DNA collected from
under the nails of the victim was from more than one man….
Well, today’s banner
headline in The New Day,
our local paper, reads Sin justicia
or No Justice, and there’s not much doubt—there was no justice done indeed. And
the family of the victim came out and said it, yesterday—Irizarry was involved.
Well, if he
was, wouldn’t you think there would be physical evidence? Oh, but there’s a
problem—no one bothered to impound the judge’s car until two years after the
murder of Ortiz.
Two
factors—no, three—entered into this case.
Race—de los
Santos is black;
Nationality—de
los Santos is from the next island over, Dominican Republic. And yes, there’s a
lot of prejudice
against Dominicans here in Puerto Rico;
Do I need
to tell you what the last factor is?
Minimally,
it’s class; maximally, it’s the convergence of wealth, power, and politics. So
for the last three years a woman had to take the rap for someone else—someone
for whom she also had to clean his toilet. And for the last six weeks or so
we’ve had to watch as a sham of a trial played out.
Justice has
been served, said some—after all, de los Santos wasn’t convicted, right? In the
end, it worked for her, didn’t it?
Don’t see
that—at one point in the ordeal, de los Santos may have attempted to take her
life (her version is that she woke up in the Witness Protection Center when
somebody was slipping ropes around her neck). No matter how innocent you knew
you were, how—especially coming from the Dominican Republic—could you trust
that you’d get a fair trial?
Mind you, I
don’t think the judge did it—he would have been about 88 at the time. But for
the same reason, it was never very credible that de los Santos did it, either.
Just to
intrude this bloody fact into your day, it takes a lot of butchery and strength
to slit the throat, as somebody did that bad day in June of 2010 to Ortiz. You
need strength and surprise, as well as the trust of the victim. And so de los
Santos would have needed to be exceptionally strong or exceptionally enraged to
have killed her boss in that way.
Throughout
the day, I’ve been listening to the most amazing music—music by a composer whom
I can’t believe isn’t much more well-known, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, born in Germany forty years before Johann Sebastian Bach. Here’s his
Requiem `a 15, a
stunning work.
To the
memory of Georgina Ortiz Ortiz. May she rest in peace.
