Having read a bit about the case on English and Spanish sites in the months after the incident, however, I have to say the writing about the case in the US has been egregiously misleading — mostly due to folks overlaying their expectations from US law onto another nation’s legal system and culture.

It began with the reports in the US of “he turned himself in on a murder charge!”, always with the subtext of imply admission of guilt. But the police were seeking him as a named suspect — not reporting to the police station would have been fleeing the law. “Turning himself in” the next day was the most sensible & responsible thing Villalona could do.

The facts of the case were extremely murky in the Dominican newspapers. It’s quite possible that that was due to PR and people tied the defense throwing everything they could against the wall — I don’t know. But I’ll just say my recollection is that it seemed murky. There were some who said Villalona, while there earlier, was no longer on the scene — the primary witnesses for the prosecution seemed to be family members of the victim. Again, I have no way of knowing what happened or which of these reports were reliable (or even total confidence in my memory 3 years after reading these things). I just know that I came away from reading with no sense of there being any way to know without attending the hearings.

When the case was resolved due to “lack of evidence”, the implication in US reports became “how corrupt that a payment was made and then those officials dropped the case (don’t they want to see justice done! money will get you out of anything!)”. Or the implication was that the victims family could decide not to press charges in a murder case — which isn’t true in the Dominican.

Yet if the law was so corrupt as to dismiss charges after a payment was made, why would they not be so corrupt as to generate charges so that an extortionary payment would be necessary? If the first type of corruption exists, the other is certainly plausible & I’d say likely.

Yet again, without any way to discern, folks have been mighty willing to make determinations.

But since it doesn’t, I am going to assume it was with his sick dance moves during a dance off that the deceased initiated.