The taxi driver who took actor Thiago Rodrigues from Praça Santos Dumont to Estrada do Joá, both in Rio’s South Zone, said he noticed he was stranded for about 30 minutes before arriving at the fairgrounds. In a statement issued to the 15th DP (Gávea), the driver said he arrived at the scene around 5:50 a.m. on December 11, three minutes after the boy was caught by surveillance cameras trying to had fallen from his own height to keep his balance… in the structure of one of the tents. In view of the analysis of the images and the questioning of witnesses, the investigation must be reported as an atypical matter and a motion to drop the proceedings is filed.
Images showing the fall of actor Thiago Rodrigues in Praça Santos Dumont in Gávea, in the South Zone of Rio Photo: reproduction
According to the statement, the lawyer, who works as a taxi driver in his free time, stopped at the spot in front of 140 Santos Dumont. He said he saw a person lying by the stalls at the antiques market that takes place there on Sundays. After about 30 minutes had passed, the driver said he noticed two or three people approaching the person. As she got up, she noticed it was a white boy wearing a cap and carrying a backpack on his back.
While still at the police station, the taxi driver said that Thiago went to the stop and asked if he could take him home to Estrada do Joá in São Conrado. In the taxi, the actor would have claimed to have a bleeding head and, without removing his hat, showed his hand with the blood on it. The driver then said he directed him to go to a hospital to have the wound bandaged and denied asking what happened as he thought he was being robbed.
When Thiago Rodrigues arrived at the destination at 6:52 a.m., he said he didn’t have a cell phone and asked the taxi driver to write the phone number on a piece of paper, promising that he would then transfer R$30.65 per pix. However, the moment he wrote down the number, the actor would have opened the backpack and found the card he used to pay for the race.
According to the investigation, Thiago Rodrigues was ejected from the VIP area of a party for being involved in a mess. Information first circulated that the actor was surrounded by five criminals in Baixo Gávea when he left a bar where he was staying with friends. If he had attempted to escape, he would have been attacked, fallen to the ground, knocked unconscious and his cellphone stolen. At the police station, however, he said he was taken there by a friend who took an app car around 5:40 a.m.
— In fact, when it said five people, five robbers, I had commented on feeling like five people had beaten me. The conversations continue and this is becoming the truth and I can’t control what people say and what they don’t say. Now I’m recovering and getting back to my job, which is what I love to do the most. We just have to wait for the investigation he said last Tuesday when he left the police station.
Just after 7 a.m. that morning, Thiago Rodrigues was admitted to the Miguel Couto Municipal Hospital, also in Gávea. At the medical center, he received stitches on a laceration to his head and underwent a computed tomography scan of his skull, which showed no changes. After the exams he was released. Images circulating on social media show the actor’s injury.
Last week, the businesswoman Maria Morais, who manages him, even said that he only understood that he had been the victim of a robbery when he had already been beaten to the ground: “He is fine now, he was very injured and shocked by the situation… It’s really very sad to see how vulnerable we are to something like this. It was absurd cowardice. He wanted to take a taxi. He was leaving a nearby party and headed over to catch a cab. And when he wanted to cross Santos Dumont Square, he was already spoken to. He woke up with a lady taking care of him. But he was injured and unconscious by the time she arrived I believe. His head was badly injured, part of the scalp came off,” he said in an interview with the Revista Quem website.