On July 19 of last year at midnight, taxi driver Diego Martín Rojas was shot on Avenida del Trabajo and Pringles in Neuquén by Maximiliano Octavio Montoya. It was not during a robbery, nor because of a personal problem: the aggressor was convinced that the victim wanted to hand him over to the police, and that is why he shot her.
According to Silvia, an eyewitness, Montoya had not slept for the five days prior to the incident and moments before had consumed alcohol and cocaine. “He hallucinated that there were people, that the police were following him”declared the young woman on the first day of the oral trial that began this Tuesday.
Montoya will turn 28 next Thursday the 27th. He has an 11-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son. He has been in preventive detention for a year, because they caught him almost immediately.
That night his tour began in the Loteo Social neighborhood, he picked up Silvia at her house and they went together by taxi to the El Nido intake. From there to the Iberia hotel, at Avenida Olascoaga 294.
According to the young woman, The defendant consumed cocaine and brandished a firearm.. They were practically kicked out of the hotel for smoking in the room, around midnight on July 19, 2023. Montoya handed the revolver to Silvia, who hid it in her waistband.
In the taxi
They walked to the Sarmiento and Olascoaga taxi rank and took cell phone 494, a Renault Logan driven by Rojas, and asked him to take them to Loteo Social. She sat behind the driver, and he sat behind the passenger seat.
They were already arguing, he threatened to kill her mother. But two blocks later the topic of the fight changed: Montoya took the woman’s gun and began to threaten the driver.
“You called the police, son of a bitch, I’m going to shoot you,” Rojas said the accused told him. «You called the cap, you want to hand it over to me. He will speed up or I will burn you.
“I told him ‘calm down, I have a family waiting for me at home, I have four children’, and he said that “He had bullets for everyone, and if he lost, we would all lose.”he added.
The young woman, meanwhile, asked him not to hurt the taxi driver.
Montoya demanded that he run red lights and He claimed that police vehicles were chasing him, but there was no one on the street.
The shots
When they were near the corner of Avenida del Trabajo and Pringles, the attacker threw a can of beer at the taxi driver, who Just then he pressed the anti-panic button..
Then several things happened simultaneously. The young woman opened the car door and jumped out onto the street; Montoya shot Rojaswho also jumped out of the moving vehicle, and finally Montoya shot two more times and also jumped out of the car.
The Renault Logan continued by inertia and collided with the guardrail. The woman ran until she found a police officer who was providing additional custody and told him what had happened. Montoya ran away and was caught hours later.
As for Rojas, without realizing that he had an injury, he notified his teammates by cell phone. He was shot by all three and he still has the lead lodged in his neckbecause doctors say it is risky to operate on it.
The accusation and the defense
Prosecutor Andrés Azar and legal assistant Carolina Gutiérrez accuse Montoya of attempted murder aggravated by the use of a weaponcoercive threats with a firearm and illegal carrying of a firearm.
The private defender Sebastián Perazzoli, however, maintains that “there was a struggle inside the taxi, by chance the firearm was fired and one of the shots wounded Rojas” so the classification of culpable injuriesa misdemeanor.
The trial court is made up of Carina Álvarez, Luciano Hermosilla and Juan Manuel Kees, and initially five hearings are planned.
