AFP, published on Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 04:28
Glory, drugs, jealousy, contract killers, corruption, parties, CIA agent… nothing is missing from the cocktail of the media assassination attempt on retired baseball superstar David Ortiz, whose trial ended concluded in Santo Domingo with heavy prison sentences.
The Dominican justice sentenced late Monday evening to sentences ranging from five to thirty years in prison ten accused of the attempted murder of David Ortiz, 47, member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday that two of the defendants, Eddy Féliz, alias El Nata, 26, and Rolfi Ferreras Cruz, alias Sandy, 27, were sentenced to 30 years in prison “for their direct participation in the attempted ‘assassination”.
“Ferreras Cruz is the person who seriously injured Ortiz and injured one of his companions,” he said. Alberto Miguel Rodriguez Mota, 28, accused of having paid 10,000 dollars to the killers, will serve a 20-year prison sentence.
Icon of the Boston Red Sox, the team with which he played 14 seasons and won three World Series, Daniel Ortiz was shot in the back on June 9, 2019 while he was with friends in a nightclub in Saint -Domingo.
Urgently hospitalized, transferred to Boston and operated on four times, he survived and paid for an investigation himself to understand what had happened.
The authorities indeed began by asserting that he was not the target of the attack, assuring that the target of the killer was one of his friends, the businessman Sixto Fernandez.
“The target of this attack was not the person of David Ortiz”, said shortly after the facts the prosecutor at the time, Jean Rodriguez, today in detention for corruption in another case.
David Ortiz never believed in this theory and had hired a team of his own money to carry out an independent investigation.
“My team has spent months (Editor’s note: six) investigating the circumstances of the shooting,” wrote former Boston police commissioner Ed Davis on Twitter, hired by David Ortiz and supported in his investigation by a former CIA agent.
– Mastermind of the shootout –
The Boston Globe published part of its findings in March, which names drug dealer and overnight figure Cesar “El Abusador” Peralta as the mastermind of the shooting.
This one would have ordered the assassination because he felt “dishonored” by the baseball player. According to reports by the Boston Globe, the more Ortiz became the “center of attention” in nightclubs owned by Peralta, the more the latter “became jealous”.
David Ortiz, nicknamed “Big Grandpa”, said in the Boston Globe “sad, confused, upset” following the conclusions of his investigation.
Contacted by AFP, its communications team did not respond immediately.
Peralta, detained in Puerto Rico in connection with a drug trafficking case to which he pleaded guilty, denies ordering the attack on David Ortiz.
A total of thirteen people have been charged. Three were acquitted during the trial which lasted several days and ended on Monday evening.
“I’m a man of God, I forgave those guys, I forgave them a long time ago,” David Ortiz said during the hearing, according to media reports.
The baseball player, father of three, is an icon of the Red Sox, for which he is still a consultant.
It was thanks to one of his “homeruns” that the Red Sox had put an end to the 89-year-old “curse of the Bambino”.
Historic club, Boston had sold Babe Ruth, nicknamed the “Bambino”, almost legendary figure of baseball, to the New York Yankees in 1919 and had not won a title until 2004 (against 27 titles to the Yankees over the same period ).
Author of 2472 hits, 541 homeruns and 1768 RBI in 20 years of career in the Major League (1997-2016), David Ortiz won the title three times with Boston in 2004, but also in 2007 and 2013.
