Family member of the crime victim in Ceballos: "The 4-year-old boy was tortured."

Mislady Morell, relative of two of the four people murdered on August 24 in Ceballos, Ciego de Ávila, is calling for the death penalty for the three arrested following the multiple murder: a confessed killer (Leudys Romero) and two alleged accomplices, known in Santo Tomás (a nearby town) as El Colorao and El Kiut (according to other sources, El Buti). "The four-year-old boy was tortured," she notes in an interview given to CiberCuba.

Morell is the cousin of Raysa Rodríguez Pérez de Corcho, 50 years old, who was killed along with her teenage son, 17-year-old Lester Rivadeneira Rodríguez. The brutality they suffered when they went out to help their neighbor, Yamila Reyes Tamayo (29 years old), and her child, Richard Dariel Núñez, who is four, leads her to demand the death penalty for the killers.

According to the explanation, his cousin and her son were found on Saturday, August 24, around seven in the morning, by a daughter of the deceased, who had gone to spend the day at her mother's house. They were discovered lying in the patio of the family home. His brother, Lester Rivadeneira, received about twenty stab wounds. But that was not enough for the murderers: they cut him open from the neck to the abdomen, exposing his organs.

Yamila Reyes Tamayo, 29 years old, was also found dead in her backyard. According to the account of the events that the family has received, the four-year-old boy suffered a slow death. Before finishing him off with a blow to the head, they made cuts on the outer ear, on the arms, and "mutilated" one of his legs. It is assumed, according to the family's version, that they did this to pressure the mother into revealing where the money that the killers expected her husband to have hidden in the house was located.

It is striking that all this brutality would have taken place in less than an hour. Yamila Reyes' husband left for work at 6:10 am and at 7:00 am Raysa Rodríguez's daughter arrived and found the bodies in the backyard of the houses. She was the one who called the police.

The robbery is said to have been organized a month in advance. The confessed murderer (Leudys Romero) used to help Yamila Reyes Tamayo's husband at the farm he has in Ceballos. Shortly before the crime, the family went on a trip, and Raysa Rodríguez (the cousin of Mislady Morell) saw a person in the house, and when she asked what he was doing there, the man told her he was taking care of the property.

When his neighbors returned, he asked them, and it was a lie. But that incident went unnoticed. Not so the brutal crime that has shocked all of Cuba and that to this day it is unclear whether it was committed by one person or three. One of the accomplices was found with around 50 thousand pesos in his house, which is why he is linked to the multiple murder, although both El Colorao and El Kiut deny it categorically. However, the killer, who shows no signs of remorse, according to sources close to the case, insists that he did not act alone.

At the moment, there is no date for the trial for the crime of Ceballos. The family still does not know exactly what happened on the morning of August 24, 2024.

Cuba has not applied the death penalty since 2003 when three young men were executed for trying to flee to the United States in a small boat from Regla. Since then, there has been a sort of moratorium. The Cuban Penal Code, modified in 2022, includes in its article 344 the possibility of applying the death penalty in cases of murder. However, most of the situations in which capital punishment would be applicable are related to terrorism, mercenarism, or alleged crimes against the stability of the regime.