After meeting at 15 in the Oakwood-Vaughan area, David Obregon Castro and Sarai López Iglesias felt a deep bond when they reconnected in their late 20s.
They shared turbulent upbringings and Latino backgrounds. Obregón Castro lived in shelters and group homes as a teenager who engaged in drug trafficking for a living. López Iglesias, who emigrated as a child from Ecuador to Canada with her mother, a dance instructor, also had a far-from-idyllic youth in Toronto. She was sexually abused by someone considered a friend of the family, and ended up in a foster home, over and over again.
By 2017, they each had a child with other people.
They called each other nicknames. She was “babygirl” and “moon”. López Iglesias called Obregón Castro “child of the moon.”
There were differences. Although he did not pass grade 11, López Iglesias earned a college diploma as a youth worker.
Not only was their relationship doomed, but now the couple are facing each other in what the prosecution calls a love triangle murder trial in a downtown Toronto courthouse.
For the past 10 weeks, a Superior Court jury has been hearing the intimate details of their toxic union as the prosecution attempts to prove that Abbegail Elliott was conspired and killed after she spilled the beans about her brief affair with Obregón Castro while López Iglesias was on vacation in Mexico. .
Elliott, who was 21, was stabbed to death on the balcony of her annex apartment.
Obregón Castro and López Iglesias, both 29, are charged with first degree murder; he also faces weapons charges.
“It is the Crown’s theory that both defendants are angry at Abbegail’s revelation. It leads to a fight between the two women, retaliation by Obregón Castro and a plan by both defendants to assassinate Abbegail Elliott on May 23, 2018, ”prosecutor Karen Simone told the jury during her opening speech.
In the days after their arrest, the two swore allegiance to each other in jail letters, now trial evidence. The handwritten letters capture the volatility and intense emotions of what Obregón Castro described in court as their “love-hate relationship.”
“The first time you hurt me, damn it, I can’t even begin to tell you how much it cut me, but then there’s the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth,” Lopez. Iglesias wrote in large print, referring to his womanizer.
However, he promised to “be real to you until the day I die”, signing “We are (we are) Bonnie and Clyde, LOL”, a reference to the notorious criminal couple shot to death by Texas and Louisiana police in 1934. .
“I really love you and I do anything in the world to show how much I do. I owe you my loyalty, ”replied Obregón Castro.
After the prosecution closed his case last month, Obregón Castro entered the witness box prepared, promising his lawyer, Alana Page, to tell some “hard truths” about himself.
And he did.
Obregón Castro said he was “cutting,” selling drugs like cocaine, heroin, tranquilizers, MDMA, opioids and cannabis at the University of Toronto and other downtown locations, armed with a gun. He said this on his first day on the stand, wearing an oversized oatmeal turtleneck, his short black hair and a goatee as dark as his eyes. Throughout his testimony, he showed no emotion in answering questions concisely and without inflection.
He said he belonged to the LA Boys, whom he described as “his family and friends,” rejecting the Toronto police’s characterization of a violent street gang.
After he hooked up with López Iglesias in 2016-17, he wasn’t sure exactly when, she didn’t have a problem with her lifestyle.
“Indifferent,” he said, describing his attitude.
But she wasn’t that relaxed about his chronic cheating, checking his phone and raging after finding him texting other young women on social media.
There were breakups, reconciliations, and back-and-forth accusations of infidelity.
“I would kick her out, saying we have to be away from each other,” he testified.
Things often heated up, although how physically aggressive he became is disputed in this trial.
Defense attorney Breana Vandebeek, who represents López Iglesias alongside Nathan Gorham, told the jury that Obregón Castro “pressured her to use drugs, inflicted violence on her and escalated over time, starting with punching and slapping and, on one occasion , using the butt of a pistol to hit her on the head. “
Much of the trial has focused on the tumultuous weeks leading up to the murder.
Jurors have heard that Obregón Castro was becoming increasingly violent, leaving López Iglesias in conflict, Vandebeek said. “On the one hand, she was terrified of Obregón Castro, so terrified that she anonymously reported him to CrimeStoppers. On the other hand, she was pregnant and took care of him ”.
Things got worse after López Iglesias returned from a trip to Mexico in May 2018.
She learned that Obregón Castro had had sexual relations and had become involved with Elliott, a troubled young woman whose life choices, the prosecutor warned jurors, would find unsettling.
Elliott sent López Iglesias a “cock photo” that Obregón Castro had shared with him. López Iglesias texted her friend: “That’s what I got from Abbey,” adding, “I’m going to kill her.”
That sparked a physical confrontation between the two women on May 21 in the back parking lot of 70 Spadina Ave. López Iglesias came out on the losing side, his nose bloody and his face bitten. The jury has seen a lot of vulgar exchanges on social media between the two young women.
Enraged that a friend of Elliott’s had intervened in the fight, hitting López Iglesias in the face with a pipe, Obregón Castro, standing at the foot of the street, fired a couple of shots towards the balcony of the Spadina apartment, “trying unsuccessfully to get revenge” . Simone said.
Obregón Castro also approached an innocent man walking on the sidewalk whom he suspected of hitting López Iglesias with a pipe. I did not do it.
“You put the gun under the man’s chin, right?” Gorham asked Obregón Castro during his lengthy interrogation.
“It’s possible. I don’t remember that.”
Gorham was incredulous.
“How could you forget to put a gun under the chin of a poor boy walking down the street? How could you forget that?
The man was not injured, nor was anyone hit by the bullets fired from Obregón Castro’s gun aimed at the balcony.
Chips, one of Obregón Castro’s childhood friends, was not so lucky.
The jury heard that shortly before Elliott’s death, Obregón Castro stabbed and cut Chips in the face and admitted him to the hospital. Your sin? Give López Iglesias a ride in this car. (Obregón Castro testified that that was not the only reason why he “pushed” Chips, and that it was part of “an ongoing thing”). After that, Obregón Castro cut the tires of López Iglesias and told him to go check “his little friend,” referring to the injured Chips.
Also during that period, Obregón Castro shot a rival drug dealer twice in the legs, something he called giving someone a “leg warmer.” Gorham spent a lot of time reviewing these incidents, showing the jury bloodied photos and repeatedly accusing Obregón Castro of having a “crazy temperament” and a willingness to “kill people to respond to disrespect.”
“It is not true,” Obregón Castro answered flatly.
There is no doubt that by May 23, neither López Iglesias nor Obregón Castro liked Elliott.
They went to his apartment on the fourth floor; he said not to kill Elliott but to reclaim his belongings, along with a necklace that Elliott took from López Iglesias during their fight.
What happened there will be decided by the jury.
Obregón Castro admitted that he fired two shots inside the small unit, but testified that he did not stab Elliott. When he heard on the news that a young woman at 70 Spadina Ave. had been critically stabbed, Obregón Castro said he was “shocked and confused.”
“I didn’t have a knife. I didn’t stab her, ”he told the jury.
He did not directly implicate López Iglesias. “She and I never discussed what happened,” he said, adding that “she never confessed to me.”
However, his lawyers have set the stage. Vandebeek told the jury last week that his client had nothing to do with Elliott’s death. “She did not step on the balcony; she did not stab, encourage or assist in the killing. “
Instead, López Iglesias will point the finger directly at Obregón Castro.
“She saw him walk out onto the balcony. She saw him pull out his knife, ”Vandebeek said. “He saw a conflict on the balcony between Obregón Castro and Elliott, and then he saw Elliott fall to the ground. She didn’t stab and had nothing to do with her death. “
López Iglesias has not yet declared.
In 2018, Obregón Castro wrote a letter from prison to López Iglesias that said: “I know I did something really bad.” Gorham presented the letter at the end of his cross-examination of Obregón Castro.
“He was referring to killing Abbegail Elliott and having my client brought in for the trip,” Gorham said. “That’s what you were confessing, right?”
Obregón Castro replied: “Of course not,” and said he was referring to his serial infidelity.
Simone, the prosecutor, suggested during her cross-examination of Obregón Castro that he was forced to kill to restore honor.
“You and your partner, your Bonnie to your Clyde, killed Abbegail Elliott and executed your plan to do so on May 23, 2018,” he said.
“No, I’m not agree”.
The trial is expected to last at least two more weeks.
Reference-www.thestar.com