“We came on a bicycle; suddenly, I didn’t see him anymore,” the man said in front of the television cameras while his wife held a poster showing the child’s face.
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Yoryi Godoy in the photo that became an emblem in 1996.
They are looking for Lohan in the mountains and even in a swamp and there are adults under suspicion. The close circle. Familiar. In a spiral, from the inside out of family relationships – say the specialists – these types of cases must be investigated.
And so the disappearance of Yoryi, a case that ended in tragedy and that resonated in the Courts and then in prison.
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Loan Peña is 5 years old.
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The spiral investigation and the witness who spoke of a shovel
The press and especially television showed us, in 1997, Yoryi’s parents. To him, crying. At her, looking at him out of the corner of her eye – like someone seeking approval – after every sentence he said and talking about her son in the past tense. As if he were no longer there.
The investigative work was key. Separately, both gave their version of the events. He kept her words but she collapsed. He said that the man had hit him – a punch in the stomach – before leaving to carry out his duties as a poster letterer. And that the child was almost fainted all day; lying in bed. For the pain.
At the same time, an investigation that walked the neighborhood – the vicinity of Maza University – found valuable testimony: Yoryi’s father had asked a neighbor for a shovel. It was the night before the disappearance was reported. Another witness saw him, almost at midnight, leaving on a bicycle carrying a travel bag on his shoulder. And the shovel.
The search lasted a few days until we woke up with the sad news: the father had buried Yoryi about 10 km east of the family home. In the vacant lots where years ago the Mendoza drive-in had delighted moviegoers.
The radio reporters gave us details. Closed, Yoryi’s father had admitted that he beat the boy in the morning, that he left him dying and that in the early hours of the next day he carried him on a bicycle and buried him. And then he had staged the farce of the missing child that moved many of us because, as I said at the beginning of this chronicle, when a child is lost from our sight, our world collapses.
Yoryi’s parents were sentenced to prison at the end of a public oral trial. Co-authors of the crime aggravated by being the parents of the victim.
There was more pain and more popular indignation. Shock and stupor.
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The cover of Diario UNO on July 8, 1997 reports on the sentencing of Yoryi Godoy’s parents.
A tomb full of toys
She progressively regained her freedom until she paid her debt to society. She finished her studies and in 2019 Diario UNO found her living in El Algarrobal. New life. With a partner and everything. And in the middle of a process of giving up their last child for adoption, which was conceived during prison visits and who was born with her in prison.
He is still in prison. He has little time left to be free.
Their children – all of them were older than Yoryi – continued their lives in Mendoza and abroad.
The remains of Yoryi Godoy are buried in the public cemetery of Guaymallén. The grave is surrounded by toys, colorful balloons, dolls and fresh flowers left by those who go – those of us who go – to honor the memory of our loved ones.
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