Brazilian Justice

**Vedderman** · #1 ● 04-27-2014, 05:05 PM

Interesting case here, and quite a famous one in Brazil. I don't have a lot of photos to go with it, since the crime itself occurred in 2000, where digital photography was far less common. Brazilian readers will likely be familiar with this story and hopefully my ham-fisted handling of Portuguese will succeed in getting the salient details correct. All of you TL;DR people will likely be disappointed, as the images are sparse. For those of you who bother to read my sloppy account of the events, I hope you enjoy the sordid tale.

The victim was a 33 year old journalist named Sandra Gomide. For several years, she had been secretly dating Antônio Marcos Pimenta Neves, a very wealthy financial analyst and the editor-in-chief at the magazine Sandra worked for. In the year she died, he was 63 years old, nearly twice her age. When their relationship was made public, it began causing friction at their workplace and tension began to build. At some point, he went into a rage and beat the hell out of her.

She reported the assault to the police and broke off the affair. He tried to apologize and reconcile a few days later, but she refused his advances. Fearing obsessive stalking, she moved to a new apartment and got her family to hire bodyguards for her for a week. When no further action was taken against her, she dismissed the bodyguards and made plans to go to America to live for a few months to be away from him..

Unfortunately, her former Silver Fox wasn't ready to let the issue rest. He hired security specialists to tap her phone and watch her relentlessly, all without her knowledge. When he discovered her plans to leave the country, he took action. On August 19th, 2000, several weeks after they had broken up, Sandra took her two young nieces to a horse farm owned by the family. The girls scurried off to play with a cage full of rabbits and Sandra went to get a brush and bridle to prepare her horse for riding.

As she did so, the elderly former-beau pulled up in his car and approached her. Unbeknownst to him, a stablehand was watching the exchange from a nearby stable. According to the witness statement, the two had a heated exchange which ended with her boss grabbing her arm and trying to drag her into his car. She began screaming in terror and yelling for help. The stablehand was about to intervene when he saw Pimenta pull a revolver from his jacket. Sandra begged him not to kill her and turned to run away. She made it about four feet before he fired and shot her in the upper back, just below the bottom of her shoulders. She fell to the ground, face-down, and started trying to crawl away, still weakly screaming for help as her lung filled with blood.

The stablehand remained paralyzed with fear, deciding he would be more use as a police witness than dead on the floor. As he watched in secret, he saw Pimenta calmly approach Sandra as she struggled to crawl away. He leaned down and shot her once behind the left ear from a distance of about 35 centimeters. Then he pocketed the gun and got back in his car and drove away.

The pig circus that followed has become infamously legendary in the halls of Brazilian justice and media both. Despite the eyewitness testimony and Pimenta CONFESSING TO THE CRIME three days later, he was not initially arrested. The following week, he was hospitalized for a suicide attempt, which most people believe was a staged stunt prompted by one of his lawyers. He subsequently recanted his confession.

The following eleven years were an endless stream of appeals and loop-hole jumping through Brazil's slipshod justice system. Aside from a two-week stint in jail back in 2001, Pimenta remained a free man until 2011. During his decade at large, he finished his law degree and passed the Bar exam. When the appeals and loopholes finally ran dry, the 73 year old man was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison for the pre-meditated murder of 33 year old Sandra Gomide.

He is ostensibly a 'prisoner' today, though he lives alone in a large, well-appointed cell and leaves the prison for 9 hours every day as part of a work release program. He checks himself back in every evening to sleep alone in his one-bunk Hilton. If he were to serve the entirety of his sentence, he would be 88 years old upon release, but the expectation is that he will receive early release for good behavior by 2015 at the latest.

Like I said, images are hard to come by. Photos abound for homeless crack whores dying in the gutter, but when wealthy people with law degrees, horse farms, and journalistic credit are involved, things are run much more tightly in terms of media exposure. Included are several photos of Sandra and her killer while alive, as well as three images of her body at the crime scene. She has not been moved in the images and still lies on the stable floor, slightly on her side, where she crawled in terror before being executed by her former lover and editor-in-chief. The bridle and brush she was carrying still lie at her side.

jesse · #2 ● 04-27-2014, 05:09 PM

Money buys just about anything, doesn't it?

blancadon · #3 ● 04-27-2014, 05:35 PM

That was a good read. Thank you.

**Vedderman** · #4 ● 04-27-2014, 05:44 PM

Originally Posted by blancadon ↗

That was a good read. Thank you.

Thanks. I wished I could have found better images; I spent several hours exhausting my sources last night. The few I did find don't really show much detail and the resolution was bad. One of the court reports I read indicated that over 90 photos were taken of her at the scene, but it doesn't appear that any of them were published.