Jonathan Meléndez was on his way home when worry took hold of him. He called the house and nobody answered. He asked the security booth to buzz the apartment through the intercom, and nobody answered that either. He opened the app on his phone that showed the camera inside his home. At 7.20 pm he called the building’s security supervisor and asked him to call the police. “He told me his business partner was armed,” the supervisor said.
What had already happened inside the penthouse is among the worst crimes Mexico has known in recent years. By the end of the night, Meléndez was dead. His wife, Ana Paula González, four months pregnant, was dead with a bullet in her head. Their three-year-old daughter was dead. Aleyda Romero, the 21-year-old who helped with the house and the children, was dead. One of the dogs was dead. The only survivor was a five-year-old boy.
The account comes from the case file of the investigation, from the statements of witnesses, relatives and acquaintances, reviewed by EL PAÍS.
The man accused is Diego Sebastián N, a business partner of Meléndez, Argentine by birth and naturalized Mexican, now under arrest and facing charges. He arrived at the residential complex in Atizapán, north of Mexico City, at 5.23 pm on September 1. The guards knew him from earlier visits. Still, the guard on duty wrote down his information and called up to the apartment. The guard says a resident named Ana Paula allowed him in. But Ana Paula was not home. She arrived 19 minutes later with the two children, ages three and five. Only Aleyda Romero was in the penthouse. The visitor went in.
At 6.25 pm Aleyda went down to walk two of the family’s small dogs. The walk lasted 38 minutes. She returned at 7.03. Nothing in the judicial file shows she knew anything was wrong. She said nothing to the guard at the gate and called neither her father nor her mother. She took the elevator up four floors, reached the brown door, opened it and went in.
The 140 minutes that followed hold the massacre. From the statements, EL PAÍS reports, it began with an attempted robbery—an effort by Diego Sebastián to take hold of Meléndez’s cryptocurrency wallet. A relative told investigators that for a month the two men had been at odds. “Diego Sebastián asked him for a loan of 300,000 pesos, but he refused to lend it. It was from that time that the problems with this person began,” the relative said. They had met six months earlier. Diego Sebastián rented luxury homes; Meléndez did the advertising and took discounts on rentals in return. The relative said Meléndez had invested three million pesos in cryptocurrencies years before and kept his keys on a black USB flash drive. When the family entered the apartment after the murders, the drive was nowhere to be found.
The police came slowly. EL PAÍS’s review shows 70 minutes passed between the first call for help and a response. The Atizapán officer who took the radio call treated it as routine, a case of “disturbance of the peace.” He was near. He had only to cross the La Venta–Lechería highway, and at that hour it would take him no more than 15 minutes. When he arrived, the security supervisor let him in, and the two went up to the penthouse in building four. The officer knocked on the brown door several times. No one answered. There was no sound, not even dogs barking. “It was known that inside that penthouse there were dogs, and they were noisy,” the supervisor later told the prosecutor’s office. The officer left.
There was no sound because everyone inside was dead, everyone but the five-year-old boy. He sat among the bodies of his sister, his nanny, his father, his mother and one of the dogs. Two days later his grandmother told the Prosecutor’s Office the boy was still in shock, and that the only thing he said was that it had been “Sebas the bad guy.”
By the time the officer knocked, the alleged killer was already gone. The guard at the gate, who answered to the supervisor, had seen Diego Sebastián leave. She told investigators he pressed his gun on her to raise the exit barrier. “Come on, you bitch, open the barrier, I have to go!” she says he shouted. Beside her stood the friend who had spent the day with Meléndez. The alleged killer knew him and shouted at him too: “You, fucking little dark guy, if you even think about saying you saw me, I’ll kill you like your fucking friends!” It is strange, the file shows, that the guard told her supervisor none of this, and that the supervisor, who an hour earlier had taken Meléndez’s call asking for the police, told the officer nothing.
The friend had been with Meléndez nearly all that day. Meléndez was a popular musician on Mexico’s indie scene and the keyboardist for the band Camilo Séptimo. The two had met at one of the band’s concerts four years earlier, and the friend had come to work close beside him. That September 1 they ate at the house and went out for a game of padel. “At all times I noticed Jonathan was unsettled, like he was distracted,” the friend said in his statement. If Meléndez feared his business with Diego Sebastián, he did not say so.
The officer knocked on the brown door and heard nothing. The boy inside did not open the door. The officer thought it best to leave, and he left.