Defendant confesses to the murder of a young woman in Nova Lima for raping a child and asks ‘to analyze it carefully’

Accused of killing Mikael Douglas Sobrinho, aged 25, the boy found charred and handcuffed with his hands behind him in the Nova Lima neighborhood, in 2022, Victor Hugo de Matos Rech, aged 24, confessed to having hanged, handcuffed and charred his rival. In testimony to the Plenary of the Jury Court, the defendant also stated that he murdered Mikael because the victim raped the three-year-old niece of a colleague of his. The incident occurred in 2015.

According to Victor Hugo, the motivation for the crime was precisely revenge for this rape. “I had an 11-month-old daughter at the time, I had just lost my wife and was raising her alone. I was very angry, because I thought it could have been my daughter. So, I decided to kill him”, he says.

The defendant said that, on the day of Mikael’s murder, on October 5, 2022, he was in the building where he lives, in Jardim Canguru, when the victim arrived at the scene, after having been missing for around seven years after leaving prison, in 2015. Victor Hugo is a friend of the uncle of the child who was raped, and reports that the family spent years without knowing what to do, mainly because Mikael committed the crime when he was still 17 years old, was detained for seven months and, upon turning 18, , was released.

It was then that he decided to kill his enemy. He says that, first, he put Mikael in a rear-naked choke and then hanged the victim with a blanket he had at the scene. The defendant claims that Mikael “put his tongue out and turned purple” after the hanging. “I also noticed that he had stopped breathing.”

Mikael’s body was found with his hands handcuffed, and Victor Hugo guarantees that he arrested him after his death. “I was afraid he would come back and react,” he says.

With the help of another person involved, who was identified only as ‘Nando’, he placed the victim’s body in a Volkswagen Gol vehicle, and took it to Avenida Marquês de Herval, an area known as the ‘Nova Lima corridor’.

In the middle of the street, he took the body out of the car and set it on fire. The action was filmed by the author. Afterwards, he says that he dragged the body to the curb and that Nando fired six shots in his area, three of which hit him.

Revolt

The prosecutor, José Arturo Iunes Bobadilla Garcia, who represents the Public Ministry’s complaint, said that the case appears to be a case of a Criminal Court. However, he denies belonging to any criminal faction. The hypothesis was also raised during the investigation, being one of the Civil Police’s suspicions. “I’m not a faction”, the defendant denies.

During his testimony to the Plenary, Victor Hugo was unable to hide his feeling of outrage over the case. According to him, he wanted to prevent other possible rapes that Mikael could commit. “If I’m a monster for killing him, what is he for raping him? He even slapped her in the mouth to keep her quiet. For God’s sake,” she said.

The defendant concluded his testimony by asking the jurors at the Jury Court to “analyze the case carefully”, because “what he did was wrong, what I did was wrong and I am here to accept my share of the blame”.