It was amid this tension that the case concluded. I believe in her justice. Chamorro said, God knows I was not there. The judge told the court she'd have a verdict in two hours. ACCUSED of murder, railroaded through the Nicaraguan courts and wrongly convicted, Eric Volz can be forgiven for not having immediately recognized that his ordeal would become the foundation for. Outside's long reads email newsletter features our strongest writing, most ambitious reporting, and award-winning storytelling about the outdoors. Early comments they made about the legal system were used by the Nicaraguan media to ill effect, and local coverage was so one-sided with the people of San Juan relying on the Diario and an incensed Mercedes Alvarado for most of their information that Volz's parents would finally pay to run his side of the story as an ad. File Photo courtesy of Underwood & Underwood/Wikimedia. He's laughing out there. He has a younger sister, plus a stepsister from his mother's second marriage. What's most important about Eric is that he lacked a community; it seemed to me like he was one of those people here to make money. Agreeing to try to arrange a tte--tte between Jimnez's mother and Volz's defense lawyers, Baltodano invited Mercedes Alvarado to lunch at the Gran Diamante restaurant, near Rivas on Lake Nicaragua. You were in Managua at 5 p.m. and arrived in San Juan at 6:30. Eric didn't do it. The case for Volz's innocence seemed obvious, irrefutable. Like all of Modelo's 2,000 prisoners, they are locked in their cells from 4:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. Consensus among the embassy staff and the other two foreign reporters present was that the prosecution's case was too weak to have been brought in the first place. A 33-year-old Nicaraguan man whom Gutirrez met a day earlier, is the main suspect in the sexually motivated murder. EPA. The federal pen was better; still, he said that he had told his mother, If I die in here and they say it's suicide, don't believe it., Volz rejected the San Juan rumor that if he wasn't the actual killer, then he must have contracted Jimnez's murder. Doris's life was worth a lot more than a million dollars. He worked in carpentry, took classes at Lake Tahoe Community College, DJ'd at a local bar, and built a reputation as an exceptional free climber. Following it, at roughly 1:15 p.m., Volz, Castillo, and Adam Paredes, EP's art director, sat down to a lunch of curried fish served by the housekeeper, Martha Carolina Aguirre Corea. He was home for the holidays from the job he held, legally, in Texas. We can't afford to fight them in court. San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua, is a fishing-and-tourist town of colorfully painted wooden homes laid out on lazy Pacific-coast streets where bicycles outnumber vehicles, where kids set up goal markers out of rocks for afternoon games of ftbol, where locals pass the evenings exchanging gossip on their stoops or attending mass. Los Aos Ochentas, as the Sandinista contra war of the 1980s is carefully referred to here, is long over, though the memories of it remain. Then I saw the cops. She went inside and returned with a credit-card slip bearing what appeared to be his signature, but the delivery driver never saw Volz himself. Now, back in town with his role in the trial over for him, he said something different. A German tourist has been shot dead in White River, Mpumalanga overnight. I am afraid of people here. Rojas presented an impassioned closing statement. Yeah, I knew her at the beach, when I'd pass her shop. The folding chairs in the gallery had been removed so that now the space seemed like a pen. In 2018, no such homicides had been recorded.. The town didn't know him; that's why they were so quick to condemn him., Have you heard the expression 'Pueblo pequeo, infierno grande'? he asked. I'm one of the people that has been most hurt by it., The experience had, obviously, changed him. Last seen alive in front of her shop at 11:30 that morning, Jimnez was found shortly after 2:00 p.m. when the building's watchman, noticing that the boutique was closed, let himself in with a key. Alone in the room, we sat together on a bench. Things have been changing quickly in San Juan over the past five years. Over the summer, a 19-year-old Canadian tourist was robbed and raped after a local tried to offer her a ride from San Jose to Puerto Viejo, reports The Costa Rica Star. The day before the trial, the Volz family asked visitors to their Web site to pray for the safety of all involved in and surrounding the trial: Eric, witnesses, press, attorneys, bystanders, security, police; Health of one of Eric's key defense team who is sick with the flu; Judge; Doris's mother & family; That the trial is swift and that Eric will be free on Friday!. Barbed-wire-crowned walls surrounded the facility, punctuated here and there with towers manned by armed guards. Middle-class by U.S. standards, Volz's parents say that they've spent their life savings defending their son. That is the way I start each day. Soon enough, Volz and Chamorro arrived, and the cameras began flashing. In . I still don't know exactly why I'm being forced to walk this path, he wrote. Students have been at the forefront of the anti-government protests. Consider arrangements to depart the country quickly. With sentiment tilted so heavily against Volz and because a jury trial rules out the possibility of appeal, the defense opted for a judge; the trial was set for January 26. Sign up today. Then she sat and began to speak. He went looking for more kids. It was 5:40 am on a rainy Tuesday, March 30th. He was being held in the Granada penitentiary, a facility off the highway that houses 800 prisoners on small grounds. Indeed, a terrified Nick Purdy looked at the door after being dismissed from his testimony and said, I ain't going out on the street.. Rivas returned to Nicaragua to take care of his dying father and was arrested, tortured . An enemy. San Pedro Sula, in the northwest of the country, is at the center of much of this small Central American country's violence. Volz took up climbing at a local gym when he was 11, as a way to deal with his parents' divorce. Holmann expanded the invitation to include Krusty Dangla's lawyer, Cesar Baltodano, and commissioner Yamil Gutirrez, of the Rivas police. Check if you need one below. tourist murdered in nicaragua. Toxicology put Jimnez's blood alcohol content at 0.3, a bizarrely high level. We calculated the number of Americans murdered in a country per 100,000 American tourists, using travel numbers from a dataset gathered by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Social distancing must be observed. A friend? Chamorro laughed. I realized that hanging out in the mountains and staying in shape was great, but I wasn't really doing much., Volz's climbing friends would be among the first to come to his defense after his arrest. We are trying to support all of this with the same infrastructure that we had 30 years ago. An 18-year old suspect was charged. They explained that the misrecording of Volz's blood type was a typo and acknowledged that fluid from Jimnez's vagina and anus revealed no presence of semen. Eric Volz in a visiting room in the Modelo National Penitentiary, outside the Nicaraguan town of Tipitapa, March 27, 2007. A student at Ave Maria College of the Americas, near Managua, whose family has ties to both Nicaragua and South Florida, Llanes was never taken into custody. 'Do you think he really loves me?' Cell-phone records could not prove Volz was the one using the phone, the prosecution claimed, nor could instant messages. CURRENCY RESTRICTIONS FOR ENTRY: Must declare $10,000 USD or more in cash. I can never go back to my town. BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Four LGBT+ people are murdered every day in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to "alarming" new research released on Thursday by a . Two of them, local surfers who ran in the same posse, were picked up soon after the murder: Julio Martn Chamorro Lpez, 30, better known as Rosita, was nabbed after a policeman remembered seeing him wandering near Sol Fashion shirtless, bearing what appeared to be fresh scratches and acting nervous. Nelson Antonio Lpez Dangla, 24, who goes by the nickname Krusty, was arrested shortly after Chamorro. One outfit, Nica Dev, promises that they develop with a conscience, advertising green communities built around ecological reserves, and Century 21's ads exhort readers to preserve the beaches.. This is what a mother wanted not a million dollars, but justice, as the cameras flashed and rolled. Then, at a special hearing on January 16, the pre-trial judge, Rivas district judge Dr. Edward Peter Palma Mora, ordered Volz released to house arrest. She said Ricardo Castillo wasn't credible; she said Dangla was. The Nicaraguan criminal-justice system does not yet test for DNA, and I found no fingerprint evidence against any of the defendants. Volz wore a jean jacket, the outlines of a bulletproof vest visible underneath. She was beatified. At the far end of the yard, I suddenly realized that I was surrounded by inmates, no guards in sight. Eric was working to get beyond those divisive cultural and political relations. Playa Madera, four miles north of town, is where they all surfed Volz, Chamorro, Dangla. From somewhere, I could hear the echo of men singing. At 4:38 p.m. the first call outside Managua appears on the log, the following 11 calls tracing the trajectory of someone driving quickly, arriving in the San Juan cellular area at 6:34. He was dropped from suspicion when he produced a statement from his university registrar accounting for his whereabouts during some of the time of the murder. It wasn't like I moved to San Juan del Sur and was just, Oh my God, a Latina sexy. It's better that it's both of them., Outside on the street, the mob was jubilant. But the judge had tossed out all but three of Volz's witnesses as redundant, allowing him only Nick Purdy, the consultant; Ricardo Castillo, the journalist; and Rossy Estrada, the hairstylist. Two of the gunmen were killed and a tourist from Utah was injured. When he was ten, his family moved from Sacramento to Nashville, where his divorced parents both still live. Chamorro was never called; the statement he would later recant did not factor into the trial in any significant way. What quickly transpired, however, was anything but positive. On the higher end, this could mean a $500,000, 2,500-square-foot house in a gated community overlooking one of these stunning beaches, with its own restaurants, swimming pools, shops, clubhouses, DirecTV, wireless Internet, and full security. It wouldn't be until after the trial that Chamorro's lawyer told me the statement had been coerced. He didn't like his picture being taken, and menaced the photographers the first day. Over 40 years?. It's expat surfers who are building many of the developments here. CURRENCY RESTRICTIONS FOR EXIT: None. I'd been disappointed before by tales of paradise that turn out to be tourist traps, but my first view of the bay, hemmed in by two sets of cliffs like the Pillars of Hercules, left me diving into the surf as the sun set, wearing a smile as warm as the water around me. Down on the street when Roque and I left the Dolce Vita, four young men in blue shirts, all bouncers from the Otangani disco, at the edge of town, were passing out photocopies of Jimnez's picture. Entering the Modelo grounds, I saw industrial penitentiary buildings in need of paint. Eric wasn't even her first American boyfriend. I'd see her every day. Asked how he felt, Dangla said, Very good. Countries may further restrict travel or bring in new rules at short notice, for example due to a new COVID-19 variant. People tell me they're in the grocery store looking at which kind of juice to buy and they think about me, he said. Depending on your nationality, you may need a tourist visa to enter Nicaragua. One Saturday night in early December, Roque and I had a drink on the rooftop of the La Dolce Vita Hotel, getting started on what usually wound up at four in the morning in the low-key and hidden L'Mche's Bar. Yeah, Eric Volz is a man in prison, but Doris is the one who lost her life. I then quietly go downstairs to check my e-mail for any news from our attorneys or a message from someone who is sending us love or support., Volz was able to contribute one posting himself, on January 4. But the people of San Juan had made up their minds: At Big Wave Dave's, the long-haired beauties tending bar began casually rebuffing expat advances with the simple and musical refrain Gringos son asesinos. Gringos are murderers. Dane Anthony, Volz's stepfather, has left his 18-year career at Nashville's Belmont University, where he was an associate dean of students, to focus full-time on the case. I have a lot of enemies They steal my money, my food. Suspect Was On The Scene. He asked me to say hello to his family, and if I could give him a little money to buy a soft drink, he'd like that. US EMBASSY ADVISES ACCUSED GRINGO TO KEEP QUIET. That premise quickly fell apart as the police issued warrants for four men. And that's the incredibly tragic irony of this case. The water is warm and clean, the sand soft. We can't even jaywalk without being harassed by the police.. And then I read the evidence regarding Volz's alibi: cell-phone records, a time-stamped instant-messaging log, page after page of statements by the ten people most of whom I would later interview myself supporting Volz's account. 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