Barahona.- A police officer identified as Yunior Cuevas, shot at the vehicle carrying Altagracia Magnolia Reyes Florián, 48 years old, along with two work colleagues and the chef from the company Ricafé, after delivering food rations at the Dr. Clarence Hamilton Basic School, in the Ríochill sector of the municipality.
“My leg is numb, I’m bleeding, you know…”, with sadness, but, above all, with helplessness, expresses Doña Altagracia Reyes Florián, who was saved by a “hair’s breadth” from being shot.
Reyes Florián was hit by a bullet in the thigh of her left leg, for which she was taken to the emergency room of the Jaime Mota University Teaching Regional Hospital where she was treated, and later certified by a forensic doctor from the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (Inacif) in this community.
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Cuevas, the agent of the Preventive Police in Santa Cruz de Barahona who fired, indicates that he was driving at high speed, which is why a slight collision occurred, to which he reacted by firing a burst of shots at the vehicle boarded by the three women and the chef who was driving it.
They report that instead of acting with haste, the police officer drew his service weapon and fired several times at the vehicle, an action from which, fortunately, the other three people who were in it were unharmed.
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The spokesperson for the Southern Regional Directorate of the Police, based in Barahona, Sergeant Argenis Rubio, when contacted about this incident of police violence, said that the officer is in custody at the institution’s headquarters.
Rubio indicated that a commission was formed, comprised of several police agencies, including the Central Directorate of Criminal Investigations (Dicrim), which will conduct the investigation into this event that could have ended in a regrettable tragedy.
Police Aggressions
Enver Heredia, owner of the company Ricafé, described the event as “intolerable”, especially because he believes that agent Yunior Cuevas should have been cautious and prudent, especially knowing that the vehicle was leaving a school and could have also affected students from the educational center.
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Heredia lamented that the National Police continues to do the opposite of its duty, which is to protect citizens, and not to violate them as in this and other cases remembered with sorrow throughout the country. He deplored that this behavior of many police officers seems to be normalized despite the police reform with which the law enforcement agency claims to be training and reinforcing the conditions of its agents.
In that sense, he said he hopes that the investigation, in addition to the police entities, will be taken over by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, to guarantee the timely sanction that the law establishes for these cases, and thus avoid it being forgotten and in impunity as in so many other similar events.
