What Laura Valentina Lozano’s mother told the Prosecutor’s Office about her alleged femicide perpetrator

José David López Celis, the alleged femicide perpetrator of the young student and artistic skater Laura Valentina Lozano, whose crime was committed in an apartment in the Cedritos neighborhood, north of Bogotá, on February 21, was again captured and put behind bars at the request of the Attorney General’s Office.

López Celis had already been detained on February 21, but was released by Judge 58 of guarantees for not being considered a danger to society. However, new material evidence provided by the prosecuting entity allowed the re-arrest of the subject who was at the La Colina clinic.

In fact, EL TIEMPO established that one of the interviews given by the victim’s mother before the Attorney General’s Office was key to determining his involvement in the events, as well as the violence that the accused perpetrator had been exerting against Laura Valentina.

According to the chronology of events, Laura Valentina went to López Celis’s apartment to pick up her pet. In that place, the accused perpetrator allegedly threatened the young woman saying he was going to hang a rope around his neck and jump from the third floor of the apartment.

Immediately after, they began a verbal argument, which escalated to blows and later, to the death of the young woman at the hands of López Celis.

Forensic medicine determined that the young woman died of mechanical asphyxiation by strangulation.

The Investigative Unit of EL TIEMPO learned parts of the report which states that the young woman had already been a victim of gender-based violence by this subject.

In fact, this was confirmed by her mother, Nancy Torres Ardila, in an interview she gave before the Attorney General’s Office and which was taken up in the preliminary hearings against him.

“According to Nancy Torres’s version, the relationship was accompanied by prior domestic violence, psychological in nature, involving both the mother and the daughter. According to the interview she gave, she emphasizes that Laura thought about suicide and the situation affected her to the point that she had to intervene to ask Laura to leave José David”, the Attorney General’s Office reported.

And added: “He told Laura that without him she was incapable of anything, and that she would not get ahead. In the young woman’s words, she ‘felt like garbage.’ This with the sole purpose of generating security, perpetrating an environment of fear, discrimination, and gender violence.”

(Consult here all the articles from the Investigative Unit of EL TIEMPO)

Also, in the interview, the young woman’s mother stated that, besides the violence exerted by the now-captured man, he pressured them to acquire debts with credit cards and later threatened them.

The Attorney General’s Office will present new evidence against the subject in the coming hours to request that he be sent to prison. He has already been charged with aggravated femicide.

INVESTIGATIVE UNIT

u.investigativa@eltiempo.com

@UinvestigativaET

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