Requiem for the Judge's Wife

Well, the word is in. After an ordeal of three years, Aida de los Santos, the mucama or bedchamber maid, is free and innocent of all charges.

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.  

Tropical Winds

Well, the opportunities down here in the tropics are blossoming like cherry trees.

While our northern friends may be worrying themselves about Syria, the IRS / PRISM / HSA affairs, climate change and the Iraq / Afghanistan debacles, we have other things on our mind.

First off—did the mucama / bedchamber maid kill Georgina Ortiz Ortiz? Well, she’s being tried in the murder of 17 August 2010, but nasty tongues are saying otherwise. The couple had stopped having marital intimacy, they communicated through others on the Internet, and Georgina had declared that she wanted to divorce herself from her husband. Worse, according to those savage tongues, Georgina was having an affair with her 48 year-old personal trainer.

People are interested in all this because, well, it’s interesting. Oh, and Georgina’s husband Carlos Irizarry Yunqué, whom the aforementioned evil tongues suspect of actually committing the crime, is a retired Supreme Court judge, now on the faculty of one of the best law schools on the island.

The police suspect the maid, who is in fact on trial this week. And it’s true—well, it’s supposed to be true—that she had told the security guard, as she passed him, “I’m gonna kill that bitch,” using the word perra. Unfortunately, Georgina has a little dog, and yes, it’s female. So who knows what she meant?

Oh, and the security guard certainly has a shifting memory. The murder took place at three in the afternoon, and the security guard testified yesterday that the judge was absent and came back at around 5PM. The problem? On the day of the murder, the security guard said the judge came home at 3PM.

Then there’s more confusion—a neighbor who was first on the scene (well, second, after the killer) states that the scene was altered: one of the knives had been moved, the hilt cleaned, and the knife placed in the right hand. The neighbor testified that the judge was muy mal and kept asking why his wife had wanted to kill herself.

OK—and the mucama? Well, she’s a Dominican by the name of Aida de los Santos; early reports mention that she’s undocumented, later reports don’t. But it’s significant that she’s Dominican because, yes, there is some prejudice against Dominicans. And her story turns a bit bizarre—a story in First Hour / Primera Hora reveals that while in custody in the Witness and Victims shelter, she either tried to hang herself, or someone slipped a rope around her neck and pulled it tight. De los Santos’ family says it was a murder attempt, the shelter says it was suicide. De los Santos, at any rate, woke up in a hospital bed the next day after guards at the shelter used their cellular phone to call the ambulance; the phones at the shelter weren’t working that night.

There is some evidence against de los Santos. Her granddaughter testified that de los Santos had given her three bracelets, worth $1,400, with the initials “G” and “C,” presumably standing for Georgina and Carlos. The granddaughter was to go find someone to remove the monograms, and then sell the bracelets, to finance a trip back to a new life in the Dominican Republic. There are rumors as well about a bloodstained fingerprint on the hilt of the knife—if it is de los Santos’ print, it would be hard evidence against her.

Then there is the age of the ex-judge: he was 88 at the time of the murder. Could a man of that age kill a woman strong enough to have a personal trainer? If he were in a rage, and if he surprised the victim, could he do it?

Stay tuned, readers. More later, as we say down here.

Then there’s the interesting news that the AMA, of Mass Transit Authority, has been a bit relaxed about checking the driver’s licenses of the bus drivers, 12 of whom have been found to be without valid licenses. So that means that 12 buses are idled, which is major anguish, since it can take up to an hour to catch a bus, which may well pass you by, if the bus is full or the driver thinks it’s full (there’s always room at the back) or if, for some reason, he is simply disinclined to stop.

“So why don’t they hire temporary drivers?” I said to my friend Tony.

“They’re broke,” he said, “They’re five or fifty million (can’t remember which) in the red.”

So I had to tell Tony the reason—half of the time, riders ride for free! Eight years ago, when the Urban Train started, all of the buses got refitted with new meters that would read the little cards that the train reads. And the train, in private hands, has been duly maintaining the readers. The Mass Transit Authority, on the other hand, a government agency….

“Well, now you can tell them,” I said, after he commented that the new head of the AMA can’t figure out why the train’s ridership is up and the AMA’s ridership is consistently sinking, essentially at the rate the meters break down.

“Or we could wait until the last meter breaks and ridership is at 0 and all the buses are totally crowded and the director is completely nuts,” he said.

We agreed, his was the better idea.

Oh, and did I mention that according to The New Day, our local paper, if we get downgraded by Moody’s and the like 100,000 jobs will be lost, investors will lose 4.6 billion dollars, our sales tax will hit 18.5%, and the economy will shrink by 5%?

Oh, and we have until June 25 to do something about it.

The governor is proposing, in this dire situation, lowering the sales tax. What’s the scoop, you ask? Well, the governor proposes taxing business to business; here’s how it works. At the moment, the government doesn’t charge a tax on Sony when it sells televisions to Wal-Mart; under the governor’s plan, it would. Now those good people at Wal-Mart could suck it up and absorb the bite, or they could turn around and sock it to the customer.

Well, in this situation, you’d expect urgent meeting, crisis management, guys in suits looking worried-but-calm going into and out of marble-walled capitol offices, right?

What—are you crazy?

The governor and most of the legislature are busy this weekend.

What are they doing?

You really wanna know?

Not sure…YES, tell me!

Attending the Puerto Rico Day Parade in New York City!