Global Courant
Jimena Adúriz (58) does not want to talk about Jorge Mangeri (55).
“That man”, “that person”, “my daughter’s murderer”, he says every time, during the interview with Clarín, he necessarily has to refer to him.
He once declared in a report that he had forgiven him, but he no longer wants to take up a minute of the chat at the doorman.
On June 10, 2013, Mangeri killed Ángeles Rawson (16) in the building at 2360 Ravignani street, in Palermo, where he worked and Ángeles lived with his family. He did it after trying to rape her and for her to defend herself against him.
The girl’s body appeared on the morning of the 11th at the Ceamse property of José León Suárez.
The janitor had thrown it into a dumpster so it would never be found. But the plan failed him and she failed him so much that, four days after the discovery of her body, he ended up in jail.
He incriminated himself and finally the DNA extracted from under the victim’s fingernails ended up complicating him permanently. In 2015 he was sentenced to “life imprisonment”, today he lives in the Ezeiza prison – where he is studying Social Work – and he is decades away from thinking about being released.
Although it may seem unbelievable, 10 years have passed since the case that moved Argentine society like few others. A decade, a round anniversary that, Jimena admits, hits harder than any other. “It is enough to see the children of the family who were one-year-old babies and are now 11-year-olds to realize how much time has passed,” says Ángeles’ mother.
Jimena received Clarín in the Barrio Norte apartment that belonged to her mother-in-law and to which she moved a few years ago with her husband, Sergio Opatowski (65), and their son Axel (26). She is always nice to the press, which helps her keep the memory of Angeles alive. She is kind although for a long time the journalists were (we were) part of the hell that she had to suffer.
Sergio Opatowski and Jimena Aduriz.
“The same night of Friday the 14th, after declaring in the prosecutor’s office, we had to go live at my brother’s house in San Isidro and leave everything in Ravignani. There were journalistic guards in all my family’s houses. I had to change my physical appearance. After the first month, I cut my hair and dyed it black to feel calmer and to be able to go out without being recognized,” says Jimena.
In those terrible days in which her husband, Sergio Opatowski, was regarded as the main suspect, Jimena had to mix her mourning with the panic of being arrested and even with the distance of some acquaintances who stopped talking to her.
“That generated something very ugly… very ugly. It was so strong, so intense and so violent that it took away the importance of what really had to happen, which was knowing what had happened with Angeles,” Jimena recalls but does not want to focus on that, but in the memory of his daughter.
-What was your daughter like, how do you remember her?
-Angeles was a character! We called her Mumi because when she was little she was so, so, divine, so sweet, so smiling, that she was edible. And I really like dulce de leche candies, the “mu-mu”, many will remember them. And from there she was left with Mumi. She loved that nickname. We were very companions, she was super sticky with me. We lived in a world full of boys and we had become buddies. We were friends on Facebook, texting was permanent. We would escape to the corner to have breakfast and have coffee. We did girly things, things that were everything to me.
-It was always said that she was a very good student.
-Yes, she had a commitment to excellence. For example: she was not very good at volleyball and she asked the teacher to teach her techniques. If she failed, she tried harder. They always demanded a lot from me in my family context, that’s why I didn’t directly demand anything from her, Ángeles didn’t even know how to cook a fried egg. She always helped, she did some chores and I paid her a few pesos so that she would have her money. She was a very cool girl, with a lot of social commitment, she had been greatly affected by Candela’s crime, for example.
The painful post of Jimena Adúriz, mother of Ángeles Rawson (16), the teenager murdered in June 2013.
-Candela Sol Rodríguez (11), the girl kidnapped and murdered in 2011?
-Yes, Ángeles was very, very moved. She made a post on Facebook saying “political gentlemen, we don’t want more Candelas.” She did it although at home it was not something that was frequent to talk about politics. We are Christians and there is much talk about looking at the other, about solidarity, about the importance of highlighting acts of solidarity or putting oneself in the other’s place, about sharing, about non-violence of any kind. But no, we weren’t, for example, watching the news.
“Angeles was introverted but very assertive in what she said and somewhat sarcastic and thoughtful. I always say that she was very different from me, because I am very talkative, very very emotional, very much the type that I hug and that’s it. I’m sentimental and she No, it wasn’t, it wasn’t like that. At least, she didn’t show it. But she loved it when I just caressed her hair or that we both watched a movie lying on the bed, hugging each other. We loved that… I miss that … horrors… horrors”, says Jimena and that pain leaves her body like a shock wave.
10 years have passed since the crime of Ángeles Rawson and Jimena gives more journalistic notes than normal. That takes aftermath in her body. A few days before meeting Clarín, she went to the cemetery, to the grave of her daughter, to do an interview. She then spent three days without a voice. “I stay in bed,” she defines.
“Now that we are ten years old, everything is particularly strong for us, everything is more vivid, we review everything that happened minute by minute. It happens to the members of the nuclear family and also to the extended family, including the friends, my children’s friends, everyone who has had any relationship with her,” she acknowledges.
Ángeles Rawson was murdered by goalkeeper Jorge Mangeri.
The night that changed everything
On Monday, June 10, 2013, Ángeles did not come home for dinner. Then her family felt that something was wrong. “And from our life it was destroyed, it was really destroyed,” says Jimena.
-We ever talked about it, there was something miraculous in the appearance of the body of Ángeles…
-Yes, everything was arranged so that he would never appear. Because the four trucks that left that night were four trucks that directly unloaded organic waste, they did not go through the processing plant. But that summer, in January 2013, the manual processing tapes had been put in and miraculously or by force of hers, or by God, or whatever, that truck unloaded there. And so, thanks to that, thanks to that miracle or thanks to her, I was able to find out what had happened to her. It would have been terrible not to know. Angeles even, with her index finger, marked the murderer, there was her DNA. That person today is serving the punishment he deserves and is not harming anyone else.
The drawing “Mumi” made for his stepfather.
-How did you experience the night of Friday, June 14, 2013, the one in which Mangeri entered the prosecution as a “witness” and left as a “defendant”?
-The day before we had buried Ángeles. We couldn’t go back to our house because it had been broken into. My older brother told me “don’t come back” and he took all of us, my children, my husband and me, to his house. The next day, early in the morning, he came looking for us by the Police to go make a statement. At that moment, what occupied my mind was that it had been less than 12 hours since I had seen my daughter’s crate, my baby’s, descend into the ground.
-It was an operation to reach the prosecutor’s office…
-It was in the prosecutor’s office when I had the first very bloody contact with the reality of what was happening, because when they got us out of the car on Carlos Pellegrini, we had to walk half a block between journalists who were totally enraged and I don’t know if the public was too. It is seen that all the media coverage and social condemnation was already brewing. One of my sons is big and he was covering us. That must have been around 11:30 on Friday the 14th. The first to enter to testify was my son Juan Cruz, an outrage that he went first.
-You declared later…
-I went in at 6:00 p.m. and stayed until almost 9:00 p.m. When I left, Jerónimo, the eldest, came in. And that’s when they brought him to Mangeri. I’m not going to talk about the Mangeri issue because I don’t feel like giving it substance. It was a tremendous moment when I made my statement, it was like a covert investigation. They asked me about everything. I understand the search for the truth… I do not deny the good intentions of one of the intervening legal actors, but really zero empathy towards the relatives of victims. That moment traumatized me a lot, it marked me and it’s something very common and it still happens.
-What happened to Mangeri that night at the prosecutor’s office?
-When I get out of those three hours of declaration hell, I went to the stairs to smoke a cigarette. I hadn’t eaten, they didn’t even give me a glass of water. And in the meantime Mangeri arrived. I went to say hello because I didn’t know anything and he was a person who had worked in the building for 11 years. I had not seen him because he had reported sick. Mangeri enters and then I see a doctor enter, there was a lot of movement. Jerome, who was testifying inside, came out. By then Sergio had already arrived and Jerónimo told us: “It was Jorge, he’s up to his balls.”
Jorge Mangieri, during the last hearing in the trial for the crime of Ángeles Rawson.
I reckon it was a blow.
-Even if you don’t believe it, at that moment I felt the relief of knowing that there was an identified culprit. I was very afraid because of the aggressiveness of everything, of what they said about my husband. At about one o’clock in the morning on Saturday the 15th, they began to see how they took us out of the prosecutor’s office. We had spent 13 straight hours there. We went out and there was a fence. All the journalists were behind. I went out with mom, with Sergio and with one of my brothers, who had made the change with one of my sisters-in-law.
-In the street there was a tremendous mess.
-They came to get us out with a shock brigade of the Federal Police! Terrible. We left in two groups. I remember the insults, the screams, they called Pato (Sergio Opatowski’s nickname) a murderer! I became terribly terrified because I was very afraid that they would do something to him. Very afraid. And he did not understand why. They put us in a car and like in the movie “Fast and Furious” they went down the sidewalk and from there through Florida in the wrong way to mislead the press. We changed cars and ended up in San Isidro. I get angry, I get very angry with that situation, I get very angry because that was totally free. Besides, the people, the people, the people didn’t tell me, but they didn’t want to join us. Crazy.
Jimena went through hell, but she doesn’t seem to hold a grudge against the press. For her, giving notes is a way to remember her daughter.
When she tries to explain this position, she can’t think of a better way than to use a phrase from another mother who went through a similar nightmare, Isabel Yaconis, Lucila’s mother, murdered in an attempted rape in 2003, a case that still goes unpunished: “There is nothing more terrible for a mother than your daughter, someone so present, so current, becomes a brooch, a t-shirt, an old photo.”
EMJ
