Criminal lawyer Rubén Ernesto Carrazzone was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison for the femicide of his partner, Stella Maris Sequeira, whose body was never found, judicial sources reported. The ruling was issued by the Federal Oral Court (TOF) 2 of La Plata composed of judges Alejandro Esmoris, Nelson Jarazo and Fernando Canero, which considered Carrazzone, 66, was the author of the crimes of “homicide doubly aggravated by the link and for having been committed mediating gender violence in real competition with the crime of false denunciation.”
Rubén Carrazzone with Stella Maris Sequeria. (Photo: Facebook).
The conviction coincided with the request of the trial prosecutor Hernán Schapiro, the head of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Unit on Violence against Women (UFEM), Mariela Labozzetta; and the lawyer of the lawsuit, Raquel Hermida Leyenda, who had requested the maximum penalty that is life imprisonment. Although the woman’s body was never found, both parties were able to prove, both the complaint and the prosecutor’s office, that Sequeira’s femicide occurred between 4:45 p.m. on December 29, 2016 and 11:30 a.m. the next day when Sequeira disappeared from his home in the Buenos Aires party of Ezeiza. at 5 a.m., Carrazzone reported Stella missing at the 5th Precinct. of Ezeiza. That time he said that his wife had been the victim of an extortionate kidnapping before the Departmental Directorate of Investigations of Lomas de Zamora.
The convicted Rubén Carrazzone is transferred by agents of the Federal Penitentiary Service. (Photo: Télam/Victoria Egurza)
On January 3 of that same year he repeated the same thing before the Federal Prosecutor’s Office 1 of that district, where he assured that the alleged captors demanded a ransom of 80 thousand dollars. For the prosecution, the testimonies received demonstrate “the structural violence in which Sequeira was immersed, which she suffered from Carrazzone.” After knowing the sentence, the lawyer Hermida Leyenda said she felt “very excited” and recalled her meeting with the victim: “I met Stella and I owed it to her, we had stayed to see each other for my specialty and the interview never materialized.” In turn, the lawyer said that “it was an investigation that was done side by side with the prosecution” and added: “We put the body to the cause, both Stella’s daughter and I, getting into a car, we had to investigate until we got three witnesses who did not want to speak because they were afraid.”
She also recalled that when she intervened in the case, in January 2017, both she and her children received threats: “It was hell, but we got a conviction.” For his part, Carrazzone had the opportunity to pronounce his last words moments before hearing the verdict, and said: “Those who had the obligation to clarify what happened here, have come to put more darkness than there was. Stella is missing.”
