The statement from the Uruguayan Police described that a teenager who was 1.67 meters tall, with brown hair above her shoulders and a thin build had disappeared on a beach in Rocha, about 160 kilometers from Punta del Este. In the first hours of the search, optimism reigned: Barra de Valizas is a small fishing village and it is far from being a violent place. Adriana Belmontethe mother of that minor, said that the police calmed her down: “I want to believe that she is lost.”.
Lola Luna Chomnalez15 years old, came to Uruguay to spend the holidays at her godmother’s house. Christmas had just passed and the teenager, originally from the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, went for a walk on the beach with a fanny pack, a towel and a book. The statements reported that the last time she had been seen she was wearing jean shorts, a bikini top and that she had a pink backpack with her.
As the hours pass, the initial optimism –How could something happen to a young woman in a quiet place on the Uruguayan coast?– It was becoming concern. The search was carried out in an area of seven kilometers and was increasingly intense. The searches lasted all day and included dogs and even a helicopter.
Lola’s parents traveled to Uruguay and in the country they would receive the worst news. On December 30, exactly 10 years ago, a fisherman found his body on the beachsix kilometers from Valizas towards Aguas Dulces. It was between the dunes and the bushes.
Lola Chomnalez had been murdered: The autopsy indicated that the cause was asphyxia due to suffocation. He had sand in his lungs and had suffered several knife cuts to his neck. It was ruled out that she had been abused.
The appearance of her body would just be the beginning of years and years of mystery, of marches and countermarches, of convictions and acquittals, until Lola’s true murderer was found. His case became one of the most covered in the media in Uruguay and Argentina. Hours of television and liters of ink were dedicated to him in the newspapers.
Lola’s death generated shock in two societies that, until then, were not used to hearing the word so frequently. femicide. Days, months and years passed, and the crime was not clarified. Hundreds of people went to the judicial headquarters to testify, the case was filled with suspects, judges and prosecutors changed. Even the godmother and her husband –who had invited Lola on vacation– were suspicious and they were detained, but they regained their freedom shortly after.
There was a key element: a DNA sample that was found in the backpack that the teenager carried until the end of her life. That clue would be the one that would allow us to find the true author of Lola’s crime, thanks to an innovative work from the geneticist Natalia Sandbergbut that is still missing.
It would be necessary for the samples of Alejandro, of The Council, of The Fisherman, of Juan, the bricklayer, of Huguito and of The Cachila be compared. It would also be necessary for the case to be investigated by three judges and four prosecutors, for evidence to be accumulated in the investigation, for the file to reach three thousand pages.
The request from the defenders of Lola’s family to perform a DNA analysis on 3,500 prisoners would be missing. And also their certainty that the crime would not go unpunished, that the family could one day close that door definitively.
For years, the name dand Ángel Moreira Marín –The Cachila– was directly linked to the crime. He was a car waiter from Valizas, originally from Rivera (north of Uruguay) and in 2015 he was arrested as a suspect. DNA tests disassociated him from the case, but he was arrested again four years later due to some inconsistencies that would prove that he participated in the crime.
The Cachila He had crossed paths with Lola on the beach on December 28, 2014, two days before she was found dead. According to what he declared before the Court, He offered him a picture and noted that she felt dizzy. When he went to help her, he discovered that she had no pulse. And, scared, he left.
The car attendant was imprisoned for three years and would later be acquitted by the Justice Department, which considered that there was not enough evidence to incriminate him. But the defense of Lola’s family appealed the decision of a trial judge and a Court of Appeals ruled in favor. Then, The Supreme Court of Justice confirmed the sentence for The Cachila for concealment of the homicide.
But it was still necessary to know who Lola Chomnalez’s murderer was.
Geneticist Natalia Sandberg came across an interview with Lola’s parents on YouTube in 2020. She, who has a son, thought about what it must be like to carry that pain and decided she had to do something different. Something that could give an answer, a certainty, to that family that had not yet been able to close the chapter of their daughter’s murder.
“My dream was to look at the parents and tell them that we left everything. When frustrations came, I tried to focus on the mother’s gaze with those tearful eyes hungry for justice.then he said: ‘I have to continue no matter what.’ That was my driving force, because I wanted to lower my arms 800 times,” said the geneticist, for an article in the supplement What’s happening from the Uruguayan newspaper The Country.
The thing is that, while Lola’s crime went under the radar of the media, in the National Registry of Genetic Fingerprints the murder of the teenager was always present. And much more in the head of the geneticist, for whom the case had become an obsession, the reason why some nights she could not fall asleep. The work was as a team: there was also commissioner Miguel Ríos (in Rocha) and judge Juan Giménez. Ríos was one of the officers who searched for clues among the dunes of Valizas, overwhelmed by the media coverage that the case had generated.
The criminal genetic base of Uruguay grows day by day – in April, at the time of publication of the Uruguayan media article, it was made up of 98,000 samples. A genetic profile is obtained from each specimen, which is compared daily with DNA traces obtained in unsolved cases. When the software detects a match, reports it. And in this way thousands of cases have been resolved.
But in Lola’s crime there were no positive answers. So Sandberg sought to “give another functionality” to the software –as he declared– and began to investigate at the base if anyone emerged who was closely related to the DNA they found on the belongings. They began to look for a brother who shared a father with Lola’s murderer. Or some guy. A father. A grandfather.
There were two coincidences. They were in the departments of Treinta y Tres and Durazno. The Police had to move with caution: they had to be cunning and not tell that they were investigating the Lola case. They had to talk about an important case. In this work, ten samples were collected, but there were no matches. The researchers became discouraged: there was almost nothing to do.
It was two years of ant work that ended in nothing. But Sandberg – the geneticist who remembered Lola’s mother’s teary eyes – did not accept defeat. I had to continue, there were other tabs of that technology software to investigate, he told The Country. And then the light bulb went on. He thought of something crazy: Just as relatives had been searched through the paternal line, one could go through the mother’s relationships.
It was then that a maternal brother appeared, whose DNA had been left on the belongings of the murdered Argentine teenager. The man was in prison, but investigators found the mother’s name. She was a woman who had eleven children, of which two or three were in prison, one missing and another had had family in Rocha. Was Leonardo David Senaa man who had a history of injuries and rape.
I was in Chuy, a city bordering Uruguay and Brazil. And, at dawn, the investigators surprised him in the house. The man refused to give him a DNA sample, but Ríos managed to get it from a toothbrush. Just in case, he also took a pair of underwear, an inhaler and mate. The judge requested his arrest.
Sena did not confess to the crime: “I didn’t kill that little girl, I don’t even kill a fly.” But Justice found evidence to sentence him to 27 and a half years in prison for especially aggravated homicide.. The criminal’s defense argued that the DNA that was left on the backpack was because he found the young woman’s belongings after her death and stole the money she had. According to his story, he had cut himself while picking up a bottle from the supermarket where he worked and, therefore, his blood remained on his belongings. The judge, however, stated that He got hurt when he struggled with Lola until he killed her..
The work that Sandberg led led some peace to Lola’s parents. They know that they will have the pain of the death of a child for their entire life, but at least they have certainty about the end of the teenager’s days. Now, since the murderer is known, They can have a real duel.
