When you think of San Pedro Town on Ambergris Caye, you don’t think of the San Mateo area.
You are not likely to, mainly because the residential site, a maze of wooden and, occasionally, cement houses crisscrossed by gravity-defying “London bridges” that would daunt even the most adventurous Belize City resident, does not fit in with the “sun, sand and sea” mantra which tourists and also Belizeans are fed from the moment they dock at one of the island’s many piers jutting out into the Caribbean Sea.
Today, however, Amandala did not visit La Isla Bonita for its sandy beaches. We came because of a murder, a murder occurring yesterday afternoon that despite the complex nature of the circumstances surrounding it, ended quite simply – two thrusts of a knife in the chest and abdomen, and a quick but painful death.
The victim is Roberto Jimenez Marroquin, 37, a Salvadoran with one child back home, who spent his three years here mainly as a mason at Reef Village, hardly a block from his wooden home adjoining the neighborhood grocery shop.
Yesterday, Wednesday, around 12:20 p.m., he was at a female friend’s home for a quick midday meal. But he never got back to work, simply because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
That female friend is Guatemalan domestic Aura Molina Juarez, 36, whom we found at the shop, Johary’s Store, around 2:00 this afternoon. In a way, she may be responsible for Wednesday’s events, though she categorically told us she does not feel that way.
Nonetheless, Marroquin died because Juarez’s ex-common-law-husband, Alvaro Rene “Coconut Man” Gregorio, 34, a fisherman who also lives in San Mateo, apparently thought the deceased, Marroquin, was the man Molina was seeing behind his back. Molina insists she was never romantically involved with “Roberto,” as she referred to him in our interview; she maintains that neither she nor Marroquin wanted to be anything more than friends.
In an interview with Amandala, Molina told us Gregorio, originally from Honduras, had regularly beaten her and their three children, and on one occasion, severely beat another of her five children (one of two from another relationship) with a machete.
After eight long years, filled with complaints that police never dealt with, Molina decided she had had enough and ended her relationship with Gregorio three months ago.
When Gregorio would visit, Molina told us, he would regularly beg her to take him back, but she says she always resolutely refused, because she did not want a repeat of their previous abusive relationship, and told him as much.
This time, however, things were different. Gregorio accused Molina of seeing another man, which she denied. He kept insisting, she kept denying – and then Marroquin, fresh from work, walked in.
The men, according to Molina, know each other, but not very well. So when Gregorio asked Marroquin what he was doing there, and Marroquin responded that he was there for lunch, Gregorio may have assumed the worst – that “his woman” was cheating on him, so to speak.
If this was how Gregorio was feeling, it appears it didn’t show in his mannerisms, as according to Molina, at no point during their argument or before the fatal attack, did “Coconut Man” do or say anything that gave him away as aggressive and threatening. In fact, according to Molina, he was quite calm.
And Gregorio apparently remained calm when he issued this warning to Roberto: “I don’t want anyone to come to my house and get close to my wife.”
When Roberto Marroquin failed to respond as Gregorio perhaps wanted, the fisherman picked up a 10-inch kitchen knife from the table that Molina, who was cooking nearby, had used to chop onions, and stabbed the mason twice, once in the left side of the abdomen, and another in the chest.
A post-mortem conducted this afternoon at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital morgue, according to Sgt. Paulino Reyes of San Pedro police, found that it was the chest puncture, which penetrated to his heart, that killed Marroquin.
Molina did not wait to see Gregorio inflict the wound. As soon as she saw him go for the knife she fled the house, screaming for help. When no one responded, according to her, she ventured back inside and found her friend dead, face up on the floor, and Gregorio preparing to leave.
After uttering a final threat that he would kill her, Gregorio took off at a run, carrying the bloodied knife, which he later ditched in the surrounding swamps, along with a bag of fish and conch products police say he had brought with him to the house. He left behind a $100 bill, assistance for his three children, on the table.
Gregorio was long gone, Molina told us, when San Pedro police showed up around 2:00 p.m. in response to her call. The body was removed, statements were taken, and by Wednesday night the news had made the rounds and a wanted poster was out for Gregorio’s arrest.
Just minutes before Amandala arrived at San Pedro today, Gregorio had been apprehended, around 11:30 a.m., at Belizean Shores, three miles north of San Mateo and downtown San Pedro.
At press time tonight, Gregorio remains detained and will face a charge of murder tomorrow in San Pedro Magistrate’s Court, a development that is “relieving” to Molina, who lives in fear that Gregorio will act on his threats.
She doesn’t think she is responsible for Roberto Marroquin’s death, though she naturally was saddened by it.
San Pedro police say they have no record of the abuse complaints Molina says she made.
The murder broke a month-long drought for murders in Belize. By Amandala’s unofficial records, it is number 78 for the year and first for October.