‘He had bought him a tricycle to sell fish, it was a surprise,’ says the father of a prisoner murdered in prison

The death certificate of Steven Napa Corozo indicates that a “gunshot wound” was the cause of his death on September 29, 2021. From the entrance of his house, with a dirt floor and built of zinc sheets and wood, at the 26 de Agosto cooperative in Mount Sinai, his father, Stalyn Napa, 61, shows that document, is outraged and remembers how his son’s body was handed over to him.

“They lied. He was burned, his neck was cut, but not dismembered, with one eye sticking out, his tongue hanging out, he had cuts (…). It does not say slaughtered, because that is not convenient to say to the State, they will say that it came as a surprise to them, but no, they were tortured ”.

A group of children play on a dirt and dust court in front of the house of Stalyn Napa, an ex-military man who is proud of his training and the six-foot garden he has built with white flower pots and delimited by large rocks, also painted white.

The one known as the stick of justice stands out among the plants, with long and sharp leaves that fall on the pot and its intense green shines with the sun at three o’clock in the afternoon of that Wednesday, November 10.

Steven, the youngest of their six children, aged 24, died in the prison massacre of September 28, in the Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil. A mob invaded wing 4 of ward 5 and took his life when he had three months to complete a two-year sentence for robbery, a guilt that he himself admitted to the judges. “I acknowledge having committed the crime that I am accused of,” he said when he was granted the floor at the hearing on December 14, 2020.

They had arrested him red-handed on January 18 of that year. After midnight, at the height of Casuarina Avenue, better known as Entrada de la 8, the Police registered in their detention report that a person had been a victim of robbery and assault, and that Steven Napa, upon noticing the presence of the soldiers, “ignored the voice of ‘stop, Police’, so much so that the progressive use of force was necessary.”

Steven was found in his possession two knives, a cell phone, a Fossil watch, an MK watch, two $ 10 bills and coins, the police report said. With this evidence, and without a complaint from the affected person, he was sentenced to 24 months in prison.

“He was for simple robbery, on January 17 he was released,” laments his father, a tall and corpulent Afro-Ecuadorian who does not look his age. “I have no vices or have bad nights,” he says. He speaks slowly but clearly and firmly: “I was one of those who lied to you.”

“Let’s see, sir, your son, what is his name?” They asked him on September 29 at the Office of Criminalistics and Forensic Sciences, where the morgue works, where they took the bodies massacred in prison and where he went to look for Steven .

“Ah, he is alive, go to Peni”, they confirmed when they saw the lists of the dead.

“We were happy. Thank God, I said, my son survived, ”Stalyn said, and calmly returned home. But his fatherly heart doubted.

“Four days have passed and we are going to find out again. There they tell us: ‘Your son is dead, he’s in the PJ’ “… I went and recognized him, thank God I recognized him, I feel very sorry for the other parents who still do not recognize, people do not know, the bodies are still there in a container, there in the PJ.

Stalyn Napa is a bricklayer who has been the ‘father and mother’ of his children for the past eight years, since his wife, Ana Corozo, passed away. Steven studied at the Provincia del Azuay school, where he managed to graduate at the same time as Julio, his older brother.

Don Napa has an injured knee, he must undergo surgery, however, he did not miss visits in prison, where 90% of visitors are mothers, wives, sisters. In the Litoral Penitentiary, not only was Steven being held, but also Julio, sick with pulmonary tuberculosis drug resistant, pays a 34-year sentence for manslaughter.

So it happens, it is a draw. There are parents who are not what I am and they get perfect children, it is something changed, it is the contamination, not of life but of society, what is being lived, what is offered to the young and adolescent on the street They think that all that glitters is gold, they get in, but without measuring the consequences

Stalyn Napa, 61

His son Steven, his father says, did not arrive in ward 5 nor was he part of any narco-criminal organization. “You enter a pavilion, but it does not mean that you are a member of a gang.” The judicial records reviewed by this newspaper attribute two crimes to him, in both cases for robbery on public roads.. The first in 2016, for which he was imprisoned together with his brother Julio and for which he served a two-year sentence, until 2018. From there he relapsed in 2020.

“As a father, I start to think that first they tortured him and then they killed him or burned him first. As a parent one imagines, it hurts me a lot, but I also feel sorry for other parents, you know what it is like to find your child and not find him. Thank God I recognized my son, now I am fighting for my second son ”, he says while showing the documents that he gave this month to the director of the Penitentiary to authorize the transfer of his son Julio to another prison where there is a pavilion called Priority, where he believes his son will have medical care for tuberculosis.

Stalyn Napa had raised money from the small construction sites he was doing and bought a tricycle so that Steven could sell fresh fish there on Casuarina Avenue. It was a surprise that he wanted to give him on January 17, when his grief ended.

“Everything was bought, everything, everything. I just hoped he was released, you know there is no work. I had the tricycle there, at the entrance to the 8th, the tricycle is still there ”. (I)