A court cleared a 70-year old woman Deisy Hernancez and two accomplices Yorvy Soto and Roberto de Jesus after determining she had carried out a self-kidnapping to collect cash from her daughter.
Now, the offspring of Hernández say that the woman was scammed, that their mother is a victim.
The family denies the version of the National Police that their mother faked a self-kidnapping to ask for RD$2.2 million in ransom from a daughter. They accuse Police spokesman Diego Pesqueira of discrediting their mother and the Police and Villa Altagracia prosecutor, Rosa Hernández, of not probing sufficiently into the case.
Peña explained her mother worked for 47 years as a nurse at the Villa Altagracia maternity hospital, where she left an “impeccable” resume. “My mother has no need to do that, she has her pension, her house and savings, besides she has her four children,” Peña pointed out.
“We are outraged because the necessary investigations were not carried out, it was not a kidnapping but a swindle,” said Ani Peña when interviewed in the program El Día on Telesistema Channel 11.
They accuse Yorvy Soto, friend of the family and in charge of taking the lady to her medical appointments and Roberto de Jesus, neighbor of attempted scam were arrested together with Hernandez.
Ani Peña, daughter of the 70-year old woman said that at 3:27am on Friday she received a call from her mother who was crying and scared, telling her that she was kidnapped and that a ransom needed to be paid or the kidnappers would kill her.
Minutes later, she explains, she received another call telling her not to call the police and that she should deliver the money in bills of 1000 and two thousand pesos.
The kidnapper then picked up the phone and told her “nothing is wrong,, speaking as if he were a Haitian national.
The daughter said she was very nervous and told her husband what was happening and that they decided to call her brother, Dionis Peña who was in Villa Altagracia to go to the house. When he arrived to the house, he said the door open and he called a police friend.
Then, around 4am he received a third call “and mommy told me to get the money”.
The National Police had reported last Sunday that the kidnapping of a 70-year old woman who had been arbitrarily taken from her residence in Bonao, Monseñor Nouel province, by two men, simulating a kidnapping, was a farce.
According to Diego Pesqueira, spokesman for the law enforcement agency, Deisy Esperanza Hernandez, the woman who was rescued by the agents last Friday, an action that was captured on video, acted in complicity with the two individuals to swindle her daughter for the sum of two million pesos.
“The investigations show that the whole thing was a farce to extort the daughter of the detainee whose identity is being withheld and that the three planned this crime,” said Pesqueira.
The detainee, Yorvy Soto, when questioned, freely and voluntarily commented that everything that happened in this fake kidnapping was planned by the victim. In turn, the neighbor, Roberto De Jesús Reyes, whom he said induced him to participate to help him pay a debt that he supposedly has for matters related to witchcraft issues that, according to him, had been cast on his mother, and that if he did not deliver the sum of 357,000 pesos on a fixed date, she would die.
Read more in Spanish:
El Dia
DR1 News
3 November 2022