A man was arrested this Monday on suspicion of having killed Máximo Jerez, the 11-year-old boy shot along with three cousins, who were wounded, during an attack committed on Sunday in Rosario. At the time of the arrest, residents of the area approached and destroyed the front of his home with shovels and hammers, where they assure that there was a bunker selling drugsaccording to police sources.
The arrest and the incidents began around 1:00 p.m., when the police went to the home located in Cabal at 1300 bis, in the Los Pumas neighborhood, to arrest a suspect in the shooting committed on Sunday morning against a group of people – among them several children – who was in front of a kiosk located in Paseo María de los Ángeles at 1500, in the Cabal and San José area, in the Empalme Graneros neighborhood, in the northwest of Rosario.
Immediately, the neighbors began to throw stones at the front of the house, and from inside, the suspect and his relatives responded with bottled water at the protestersso the disorder was increasing.
The event was recorded in images by different television cameras, in which the moment in which a man from the terrace of the house withdrew a firearm and fired several shots at people was observed.
⭕ Neighbors of the “Los Pumas” neighborhood of the city of Rosario dismantled with hammers and stones the house of the suspect in the crime of the 11-year-old boy murdered on public roads pic.twitter.com/clFPwyQsnj
– Telam Agency (@AgenciaTelam) March 6, 2023
Several groups of special police arrived a few minutes later, and managed to arrest the suspect, two of his children, and other relatives who were inside the house, while they fired rubber bullets at the neighbors to disperse them.
At a certain point, the police took all the detainees away and the house was released to the residents, who with sledgehammers, hammer blows and shovels managed to knock down the walls and loot everything that was left inside the house, which -according to what they said- was it was a bunker from where drugs were sold.
As the house was demolished, the neighbors applauded and “marked” other houses that they considered to be used as drug kiosks.
The neighbors took the refrigerator from the house, dismantled the bathrooms and took the toilets and even the dogafter which they started a fire inside the property that was extinguished after a few minutes.
Several protesters were injured, including Máximo’s father, who received several rubber pellets fired by the police to disperse the protesters, while the aunt of the murdered child suffered a decompensation.
Personnel from the Special Operations Troops (TOE) returned to the place after 3:00 p.m. together with firefighters to put out the flames that were registered in another house also attacked by the neighbors.
The arrest of the suspect
The troops detained the owner of the house, two of his children and two women members of the family.
Earlier, the prosecutor on duty of the Special Intentional Homicide Prosecutor Unit in charge of the case, Adrián Spelta, had reported that the car from which the shots that killed Jerez and wounded his cousins - aged 2, 13 – had been identified. and 14 years old – and said that the main hypothesis points to an attack “crossed by drug trafficking” and by a fight “for the territory”, of which both the children and their relatives were oblivious.
The director of the Children’s Hospital North Zone of Rosario, Mónica Juradoreported that the three boys who were still hospitalized were admitted at the same time as Jerez, with “firearm wounds with different injuries” although with “good evolution.”
“Two children are in a joint hospitalization warda, with their relatives, evolving. The two-year-old girl has an injury and a fracture of the proximal humerus. The fourteen-year-old is with a lesion in the mouth, on the upper lipwhich injured soft parts, but did not cause bone damage,” added Jurado.
Regarding the 13-year-old boy, the medical director said that “he is in the intensive care room, in a reserved state, but with good evolution, without respiratory support, with liver injury and pneumothoraxso he has a tube to drain that lesion.”
In this sense, he pointed out that the adolescent “He remains with the bullet lodged in the paravertebral area with no bony injury to the spinal cord. It was a miracle.”
Jurado explained that the 14-year-old boy remembers “spitting out the bullet, so the projectile probably hit some other surface and that’s why it didn’t do as much damage.”
Meanwhile, about Jerez, the medical director said that the child “arrived lifeless” at the hospital.
“They are the first children that we received this year with injuries from a firearm. In the South Zone hospital they received two,” he added.
