Global Courant 2023-04-30 14:00:55
Nine months after the assault, the Police managed to find him in Mar de Ajó. He is 48 years old and he had already been arrested eight other times.
He was new to Mar de Ajó. It was said that he was from Buenos Aires and that he had paid 20 thousand dollars for the apartment in which he lived. He got up very early. And at seven in the morning, every day, he would take his Pekingese for a walk. In the afternoon they saw him ride a motorcycle. Sometimes he would put his Pekingese in the fuel tank and tour the beach area. They had also seen him drive a Volkswagen Gol. He had a girlfriend in La Lucila del Mar, 12 kilometers from his new home.
Those were the data that most of the residents of Mar de Ajó knew about Lucas Antonio Radovich (48). What they did not know is that he has a criminal record since he was 16 years old, that he is nicknamed “El Rubio” and that they were looking for him for an armed robbery at a jewelry store in Palermo that he committed last July. He took jewelry, high-end watches, and cash. With that loot he would have bought the apartment in Mar de Ajó, the city where he was arrested on Friday.
“I’m not playing,” Radovich told the three jewelry store employees he cut down, as he remounted his gun. It was on July 22, after noon. “Go to the front window, where the Tags are (NdR: for the Tag Heuer watches). Who has the key? Don’t bother me, huh. Get on the floor,” was one of his orders to a woman. Tag Heuer prices range from $3,000 to $10,000. Then, with the keys, he opened the cabinets, took the clocks from the front window, went back to the store and emptied a safe. He also stole jewelry.
The assault was recorded by the jewelry cameras. And Radovich, although he acted with a chinstrap, was identified 15 days later, by the City Police. “The guy showed up to do a paperwork and was recognized by a worker,” says an investigator from the Robbery and Theft division who participated in the investigation. It is that the images of the assault had been disseminated by the main media.
With his name and surname and some addresses registered in the City of Buenos Aires, the investigators arrived at the data of Mar de Ajó. They traveled by the end of 2022. They did fieldwork for days, talked to neighbors. But they did not find it. They did come back with something important though: contacts from the city.
For months there was no news of “El Rubio”. With this panorama, the National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor’s Office 19 arranged for the exhibition of the images of the robbery so that if anyone could recognize it, they would contact the Robbery and Theft Division of the City Police. It was at the end of February. And in this way, through the cell phone number that they added to the broadcast material, the information arrived: Radovich had been seen again in Mar de Ajó.
With this information, officers from the 2nd Police Station of the Partido de la Costa, from Mar de Ajó detained him when he was riding his motorcycle. In the next few hours they will transfer him to the Palace of Justice of the Nation, where his statement will be taken. The case is labeled as “robbery qualified by the use of a weapon and illegal deprivation of liberty.” In the exterior filming it could not be determined if he had the support of an accomplice or if he fled alone.
His first cause is from 1991. At the age of 16, he entered a juvenile institution for a “populated and gang robbery” in Palermo. In 1993 he fell for “robbery”. His next arrests were in 1996, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2016 and 2019. The latter was for “attempted robbery”. Most of his burglaries were near his house. He lived in Almagro.
“I do this because my grandmother is sick,” was one of the things he told the employees of the jewelry store he robbed, on Scalabrini Ortíz street. “Actually, he is a kid with many drug use problems. He steals to consume. Because of his addictions, he was kicked out of several wards,” said a person who lived with him in the Devoto prison.
