Court convicts ten of thirteen defendants

The judges of the First Collegiate Court of Santo Domingo East handed down sentences Monday night to 10 of the 13 people implicated in the attempted murder of former Major League Baseball player, David Ortiz. The confusing incident involving ‘Big Papi’ occurred in June 2019, it happened in a night entertainment center in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

According to the report of the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre, Víctor Hugo Gómez, who was pointed out by the Public Prosecutor’s Office as the alleged mastermind of the act against Ortiz, was acquitted after the judges deliberated that there is no evidence against him.

Eddy Vladimir Féliz García and Rolfi Ferreyra Cruz were sentenced to 30 years in prison, the longest sentence among the defendants, the former being the one who transferred Ferreyra to the place where the latter fired the shots that wounded Ortiz and also the Dominican communicator Jhoel López.

Also sentenced were Alberto Rodríguez Mota (20 years), Oliver Moisés Mirabal Acosta and José Eduardo Ciprian Lebrón (10 years), Gabriel Alexander Féliz Vizcaíno (9 years), Joel Rodríguez de la Cruz (6 years and 6 months) and Porfirio Allende Deschamps Vásquez and Julio César de la Hoz (5 years).

De la Hoz indicated that Victor Hugo was the person who contacted him to hire people to assassinate Sixto David Fernandez, the person with whom they had mistaken David Ortiz and against whom the attack against the Cooperstown Hall of Famer was supposedly directed.

In his declarations De la Hoz affirmed that Hugo Gómez offered him US$30,000 for the execution of the macabre plan but according to the judges “the evidence showed that it was (de la Hoz) who initiated all this plot”.

Diario Libre reported that the full sentence will be read on February 8, 2023 at 9 am. Along with Víctor Hugo Gómez, Bernardo Rodríguez Valenzuela and Carlos Rafael Álvarez were found not guilty.

Last March, according to The Boston Globe, a private investigation by former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis and former CIA agent Ric Prado revealed that an alleged drug lord from the Dominican Republic named Cesar Emilio Peralta (“Cesar the Abuser”) allegedly ordered the attack on David Ortiz.

The alleged reason was because the former baseball player “had disrespected him”, for which, according to the investigation, he orchestrated a plan to place a bounty on the baseball player’s life.