The appointment was at dawn at the Hassel karaoke. A place in a garage in Usera, Madrid’s Chinatown, with boarded-up windows and a number on every table. It was March 17, 2018. Chao had received a message from the brother of a compatriot he had bumped into the day before at another bar in Leganés. He suggested seeing him in this karaoke to try and resolve things and that the problem would not go away. After all, they knew each other, visited the same places, and it was better for everyone to make peace. But at this table full of beer bottles, something happened at 3:23 a.m., the conversation very soon went wrong, and the then 23-year-old young man stabbed four of them to death. One didn’t survive. Thus began Chaos Escape.
That same night he fled Madrid. First he went to a sister’s house, where several workers from the family’s restaurants lived, to clean himself and treat his wounds. Then he left one of his friends in Atocha and disappeared. Cell phone tracking, which police later obtained, shows that he left Madrid by car a few hours later. As he force-marched away from karaoke, a man was lying on the floor next to a table, with a stab wound below his left nipple and a thoracotomy performed by the Samur toilets to try and save his life. One of the injured suffered disembowelment and another a deep laceration on the side affecting the spleen. A fourth had cuts on his hands, the result of the defense. When the first police officers and paramedics arrived, the karaoke bar, located in a cul-de-sac, was in complete chaos. Some of the wounded had managed to get out onto the avenue and attracted the attention of a city police patrol.
That tragic night was relived a few weeks ago in the Provincial Court by investigators and those involved in the fight that ended fatally. Accompanied by a Chinese interpreter and in front of a popular jury, Chaos friends and members of the opposing group told how this appointment was prepared and what happened in those few minutes of lack of control. The accused also spoke. “The day before we had an argument because they had been drinking a lot and messing with my girlfriend. We hit a car in the fight, so they called me the next day to fix it,” Chao said through his interpreter. At the end of his brief statement, he sat down next to his lawyer and touched his forehead as if wanting to Wiping sweat The lawyer comforted his client, who faces up to 20 years in prison, with a wave of his hand.
Homicide VI investigators interviewed everyone involved, but not everyone made it easy for themselves. Hermeticism was the general norm. Chaos’ friend Liu Liu even told the police that she only knew him by sight. At trial, the testimony of one of the deceased’s young friends was challenged on the grounds that he had not told the truth about what he remembered of that night. His statement was peppered with, “I don’t remember.” He is the one several witnesses point to as the one who started the fatal fight by smashing a bottle of beer over Chaos’ head. This can also be seen in the karaoke recording cameras that recorded the clash that night. Another victim that night described the encounter in Chinese and when asked about his injuries he nervously tried to stammer in Spanish that he saw the knife land on his chest.
A key test
This video of just two minutes is essential to understand the speed with which it all happened. Chao arrives with two friends to meet the brother of the person who starred in the confrontation at Leganés the day before. They sit at the same table and face each other. The brother who organized the appointment asks who Chao is and asks him to sit in the middle in front of him. A short exchange of words follows and the accused is hit with a bottle over the head. At that moment, the victim pulls out a knife and starts stabbing, while the other combatants also grab what they have on hand to attack: bottles and a stick. The fatality, 26 years old and father of two children, was one of the group, he did not take the lead in the discussion.
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Not everyone involved was hermetic. One of Chaos’s friends, who was with Usera that night, appeared before some police officers who were at an Atocha Station surveillance post the day after the murder to tell them that the day before he had been present for a fight, but that he had harmed no one. All this without speaking Spanish, with a stutter in Italian and with the help of the mobile translator. “He kept repeating ‘morto’ (dead in Italian),” one of the agents recalled at the oral hearing. This witness, who also appeared at the trial, even went so far as to show the police the Chao transport pass that he had because he had borrowed it to get around Madrid, since this young man was only visiting these days was.
Chao turned himself in in 2021. His lawyer offered the jury an explanation: “He was afraid of prison, he had the idea of a prison where they shave you, lock you up and torture you.” The defendant added that it was It was his mother who convinced him to face justice: “He told me that we could never live a normal life and that we could never see each other if he was on the run.” Now the new life really begins. The nine men and women on the jury found him guilty of murder because Chao had gone to karaoke that night with murderous intent. He heard the verdict from his interpreter. The judge will soon hand down a sentence that could see him sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for his deadly minutes playing karaoke.
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