‘Trébol’ was killed 103 days after serving his eight-month sentence

A photo of her husband in a music recording studio, a black bow, two red hearts and a green clover next to the phrase ‘eternally in love’. Vanessa Ávila Tello, 28, has this image as a WhatsApp profile.

“Her stage name was Trébol, here she is with headphones,” she says while looking at the photo of Leonardo González Guerrero, a hiphop singer, her partner since she was 15 years old, whom she met when he gave a concert at his school Manuel Córdova, from Bastion Popular, and with whom he planned to have the girl they were missing, when he was released from the Guayaquil Litoral Penitentiary, scheduled for June 17.

103 days had passed since that date when Leonardo, 32, was executed with a shot to the head during the most horrendous massacre in the country’s prisons. It happened on September 28. There, 119 inmates died, including Leonardo, with whom Vanessa spoke on the same day of the massacre.

“He contacted me at six in the morning. It was weird, because he always wrote at eight. He told me to take care of the baby, I felt sad ”, says Vanessa, who has an 11-year-old son with Leonardo. In a previous engagement, he has a 15-year-old daughter.

Leonardo was not only sad, he was also worried, even angry. With Vanessa he argued on the eve of the massacre, because It had been more than three and a half months and the judges did not give him the ballot of release, of freedom.

“My husband told me why they didn’t turn the ballot, that he already had to be out, that he had already served his sentence. ‘I don’t understand why I’m not going out yet,’ he complained to me, ”says Vanessa, with a dark complexion, short stature and brown eyes. She replied that she kept doing business with the judge and going to the judicial offices in the Albán Borja shopping center.

Since June he had submitted written insistence.

-Come on another day, the judge still hasn’t dispatched, court clerks repeated to Vanessa.

We have been asking for a hearing, that the writings be dispatched, the last one I presented was on September 27, a day before the massacre, as this happened on Tuesday (28), on Wednesday they just dispatched the brief. The judge called us to a hearing on October 25, but it was suspended, because the judge found out that he had died.

Vanessa Avila, wife

It was late. Clover had been murdered in prison. Vanessa attended the hearing with family and friends and stayed in the street, with banners, protesting the injustice against her husband.

Trébol was arrested at two in the afternoon on Saturday, October 17. He was on a corner, near his grandmother’s house, in the Popular Bastion, -the arrest report points out- when two policemen approached to search them on suspicion of drug possession and “for unusual activities (crossing of hands) in evasive attitude of control ”.

They asked him for his ID and checked his data in the SII-PNE 3W system, a platform where police officers access information about complaints, arrests, personal history, migratory movements of Ecuadorians.

These records show that Leonardo was arrested for the first time in September 2017 for illicit trafficking in narcotic substances. On that occasion They found eight sleeves containing three grams of heroin, and in the process they included a report from a doctor who evaluated him and diagnosed him with “addiction to cocaine and marijuana, suggesting a treatment ”. Clover accepted the blame and took advantage of the abbreviated procedure, so that the sentence would be reduced. Judge Iván Muñoz handed down a sentence in November 2017, two years in prison.

He was only there for a year and seven months. “I did the semi-open regime for him, he had to show up on Saturdays and do community work, he did everything,” explains Vanessa, and shows the documents stating that, indeed, her husband “did comply” and that “he participated in all the talks motivational, in cleaning mingas and in all the activities carried out ”.

In his last arrest, in October 2020, his wife believes, “the police relied on his background.”

In the judicial process, the uniformed men declared that after a thorough inspection they found “a black wallet, which contained nine covers with a green substance, apparently a substance subject to control.” A total weight of 18 grams, details the trial.

“They took him to a UPC (Community Police Unit), people said that he had been the owner of the drug, then they took him to the Model Barracks and there they asked me for money to lower the grams,” Vanessa assured: “I I told them it’s okay, I’ll give them, but put how things were, they took him unfairly, he is going to pay for something that he hasn’t done ”.

Leonardo, for the second time, availed himself of the abbreviated procedure and accepted the blame. They sentenced him, according to the process, to eight months.

Clover died from a shot to the temple. “He lost sight of the shot, he had no blows”, relates Vanessa, who presented her case before the Human Rights Committee to sue the State for judicial negligence. She and her son, Vanessa says, are receiving psychological treatment today. (I)