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Posted on Thu, Oct. 17, 2002 in
The Miami Herald.
HAVANA - The trial of a crime ring accused in the murder of five people on a
central Cuban highway wound up on Thursday, but details about the closed-door
hearing were not made public.
Police officials outside the provincial court in Havana Thursday afternoon
said the trial had ended, but they had no first hand information about what had
occurred inside.
When the trial began on Monday, authorities had confirmed that the hearings
dealt with the December mass slaying that stunned Cuban citizens. A Spanish
embassy official later said most members of the same band were being tried at
the same time in the unrelated murder of a Spanish businessman.
In the multiple slaying, a Cuba-born couple living in Miami, their daughter,
a young grandson and a family friend were shot and stabbed to death on a highway
in Matanzas province as they traveled from Havana to the central provincial city
of Santa Clara. The apparent motive was robbery.
Some of the same defendants in that case were also being tried in the
killing two months before of businessman Jose Cool Serrat, Spanish consul Carlos
Perez-Desoy said.
The Spanish businessman was killed in late October 2001, said Perez-Desoy,
who declined to provide details of the crime.
That slaying, like the subsequent mass murder, has not been reported in
state-controlled media.
Because the trial has been closed to the news media, many details about the
process were not publicly known, including the names of all the defendants and
the exact charges against them.
Criminal sentencing here generally occurs several weeks after the trial and
is issued as a written report from the tribunal.
The death penalty exists here, but is only sought in the most extreme of
murder cases. Execution here is by firing squad but no executions have been
reported in recent years.
The accused ringleader in both cases was identified by Perez-Desoy as Pedro
Giovani Cespedes.
The couple, Ada Lorenzo, 52, and Celedonio Placencia, 62, were Cuba natives
with legal U.S. residency who had arrived in Havana from Miami earlier that day.
Also slain was their grandson, Daniel Osmani Placencia, 8, and their
daughter, Yailen Placencia, 28, both of Cuba, and family friend Domingo Delgado,
who was driving the car.
Most people here eventually learned about the mass slaying from relatives
and friends living outside the country or through sporadic access to foreign
media reports. | 
