One of the sicarios said in a Mexico City court that the former CEO of Amazon Mexico, who is now on the run, paid $9,000 to two hitmen to kill his ex-wife.
When Amazon opened its first office in Mexico in 2015, Juan Carlos Garcia was named CEO. Since then, he has been on the run, but a trial is going on for the murder of his wife, Abril Pérez Sagaón.
One of the hired guns said that Garcia offered an extra $2,500 if his wife was killed before their next court date in a lawsuit she had filed against him.
Pérez had asked for a divorce from her husband after he hit her with a baseball bat in January 2019. She said he was trying to kill her. She was in Mexico City for a court hearing when a motorcyclist shot and killed her, police said.
On Monday, Pérez's murder trial began, but Garcia is still on the run. Interpol has asked police in 190 countries to find and arrest him.
García allegedly fled Mexico days after the murder and entered the US on foot through a checkpoint near Tijuana, which borders San Diego, Mexican outlet La Jornada reported.
Once in America, he penned a letter to the mayor of Mexico City proclaiming his innocence, according to local reports.
Authorities said that Pérez was flown from Nuevo Leon to Mexico City for a court-ordered mental evaluation at a private hospital. This was part of an investigation into her previous claims that her husband tried to kill her. At the time Garca killed her, she had a court order against him.
Pérez was shot and killed by a gunman as she sat in her car at a red light with her two children and her lawyer.
The mother of three said that Garca hit her while she was sleeping with a bat. The report says that he was taken into custody after the incident, but the judge let him go when the charge was changed to domestic violence.
The people close to Pérez think that Garca was the one who killed her.
“The attack was totally directed at her,” an unnamed relative told El Pais. “And the only enemy she had in her life was him.”
García was hired to run Amazon Mexico operations in 2014 and left three years later to join the commerce group Elektra, according to his LinkedIn page.
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