A man has been charged in the province of Neuquén for beating José Luis Retamal to death at an oilfield services company. It is reported that the victim, in a state of agitation, entered the parking lot and damaged several vehicles, which provoked the attacker.
The incident occurred on November 16, but the hearing for the charges took place recently when prosecutor Ana Mathieu filed charges against R.D.E. and provided context for how the attack unfolded.
That early Sunday morning, Retamal entered the company, located on Provincial Route 17, and began breaking the vehicles of employees, including the accused's Fiat Cronos. Initially, the victim "was restrained by a security guard and a company driver, who left him immobilized on the floor, face down, and called the police in Añelo," the Provincial Public Prosecutor's Office reported, according to the Argentine News Agency.
Despite this, minutes before the police arrived, the aggressor learned of the incident, approached the scene, and began punching and kicking the victim with the steel-toed boots he was wearing, then got on top of him.
"As a result of the violence he exerted, which was recorded by the company's surveillance cameras, he caused the victim's death from a serious skull trauma with a temporal bone fracture, compression of the back of the neck, and mechanical asphyxiation due to neck compression with a hyoid bone fracture," the report states.
In this way, at the hearing, the subject was charged with simple homicide as the author, and as a precautionary measure, it was requested that he be required to report once a week to the police station in the city of Río Negro where he lives, and be prohibited from leaving the country.
All of this due to the risk of flight.
The guarantees judge, Vanessa Macedo Font, approved the filing of charges but rejected the requested precautionary measures, so the accused was only charged and released.
