Olympic oxer Félix Verdejo convicted of abducting & killing pregnant girlfriend | World News
Olympic boxer Félix Verdejo Sánchez has been convicted of kidnapping and killing his pregnant girlfriend almost two years after Keishla Rodríguez Ortiz’s body was found in a lagoon.
A jury delivered a verdict on Friday after the one-month trial of the former athlete who represented Puerto Rico in the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
The jury was composed of three men and nine women, according to The Washington Post.
Verdejo, 30, was charged with kidnapping resulting in death, carjacking resulting in death, intentionally killing an unborn child, and possession of a weapon during a violent crime after Rodríguez Ortiz was found in a lagoon in San Juan.
The trial took place in the U.S. District Court of Puerto Rico and ended with the Olympic boxer guilty of kidnapping resulting in death and causing the death of an unborn child, The Washington Post reports. While a verdict could not be reached on the other two charges, Verdejo’s sentencing is set for Nov. 3.
A lawyer for Verdejo did not respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE on Friday night. “May he live the rest of his life thinking about everything he did to my daughter,” Rodríguez’s father José Antonio Rodríguez said while talking to reporters after the verdict, per Telemundo Puerto Rico. In a conversation with the local newspaper El Nuevo Día, he added that “the truth always prevails.” “I do not wish him death,” he said. “I wish him good health and that he can live as long as he can live. If he wants to live 200 years, let him live, but that he remembers what he did to my daughter, always.”
Rodríguez Ortiz’s death sparked protests across the island over the treatment of women and led Gov. Pedro Pierluisi to declare a state of emergency for gender violence in Puerto Rico, drawing attention to what he described as “the consequences of systematic machismo, inequity, discrimination, lack of education, lack of guidance and above all, lack of action.”
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“Gender violence is a social evil, based on ignorance and attitudes that cannot have space or tolerance in the Puerto Rico that we aspire to,” he said in a news release, per ABC News.
“It is my duty and my commitment as governor to establish a STOP to gender violence and for these purposes, I have declared a state of emergency.”
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