The Lleida Court has opened oral proceedings against the young man accused of murdering a taxi driver in the La Bordeta neighborhood, a crime committed in the early hours of April 10, 2022, that caused a strong commotion in the city. The hearing will be held with a popular jury between November 6 and 13.
This Friday, the selection of 36 possible candidates for the jury is scheduled. From that group will come the 11 people who will be designated the week before the start of the trial.
Requests for sentence and position of the parties
The Prosecutor's Office requests 22 and a half years in prison and five years of supervised release for an alleged crime of murder with treachery and cruelty. The private prosecution, which represents the victim's family, raises the request to 23 years in prison and eight years of supervised release. The defense, for its part, requests acquittal.
J.D.C.G., a resident of Mariola and 25 years old at the time of the events, will sit on the bench. The accusations maintain that he got into the taxi of M.E.S., 43 years old, at 1:48 a.m. in Blondel and that he sat in the back of the vehicle. Always according to that thesis, he instructed the driver to take him to an undetermined point in La Bordeta.
The sequence of the early morning of the crime
The accusations maintain that, about ten minutes later, when the taxi was driving along Sifó street, the accused acted unexpectedly and surprised the driver. They attribute to him having inflicted 27 stab wounds inside the vehicle.
The taxi driver managed to get out of the car, although he collapsed shortly after. He was transferred to the hospital, where he finally died as a result of his injuries.
After the assault, the alleged perpetrator fled and, always according to the investigation, threw the knife in a container located on Extremadura street. On that weapon, DNA remains of the victim and the investigated person were found.
The investigation of the Mossos
The Mossos d'Esquadra arrested the alleged perpetrator a year and a half after the crime, at the end of an investigation that focused on a professional-use knife acquired by a meat company from Ponent.
The investigations also placed at the center of the investigation an employee who had worked at that company until one month before the events. The investigators linked him to images captured by a camera near the taxi stand and to another sequence in which he appeared running near the crime scene.
The genetic profile of the investigated person was obtained from a can he threw in the trash, an element that allowed its comparison with the remains found on the weapon. With that material, and awaiting what the popular jury determines in November, the case now enters its decisive phase in the Audiencia de Lleida.