Ex-Amazon CEO accused of hiring a hitman to kill his wife
Former Amazon Mexico CEO Juan Carlos Garcia was charged in court this week with paying the equivalent of about $9,000 to a hitman with the aim of getting rid of his ex-wife in 2019.
García allegedly paid 180,000 Mexican pesos to two murderers, for the murder of his ex-wife, April Pérez Sagaon.
Garcia offered another 50,000 pesos (about $2,500) if they killed her before the next court hearing in her case against him, one of the killers claimed in a court hearing this week.
According to Vice As, Perez accused Garcia of trying to kill her while they were still together, and Garcia fled to the United States before the trial began in her case. Perez, who had moved from Mexico City to the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, had a restraining order against Garcia. Garcia pleaded his innocence after her murder, and sent Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, a letter in which he said, "As a father, I never wanted my children to go through something like this, which affected them and changed our lives."
After the judge demanded a psychiatric examination of Perez as part of her investigation against Garcia, the woman traveled from Nuevo Leon to a private hospital in Mexico City.
On November 25, 2019, when the car in which she was traveling with her lawyer and her two minor children stopped at a stop sign on its way back to the airport, a man approached the car and shot her in the head at close range.
No one else in the car was hurt, but Perez died that night, which coincided with the International Day of Violence against Women.
According to court records, in January 2019, Perez was asleep in their shared home when she was woken up by a blow to the head. The woman said that when she opened her eyes she saw Garcia standing in front of her with a baseball bat in his hands.
She also said Garcia made another attempt to strangle her before she pushed him away and escaped through the window of the house.
After the allegations, Garcia was briefly imprisoned and released after a judge decided there was not enough evidence to show he wanted to kill her as the charges were categorized as domestic violence.
Garcia then left Mexico, and as a result, eight people were arrested in connection with Perez's murder, including the man who allegedly pulled the trigger.
Garcia was appointed CEO of Amazon when the company opened its first office in Mexico in 2015. His whereabouts remain unknown and Interpol has issued warrants against him in 190 countries.
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