He was convicted of a quadruple crime that occurred in Florida in 1997. But he swears that he was hundreds of miles from where his murders occurred and today, at 82 years old, he continues to demand a new trial.

In 2006, Nelson Serrano , a businessman, known as a family man and born in Ecuador, was sentenced in the United States to four death sentences for the crime of four people. The US jury found him guilty in a trial that, according to Serrano’s family and lawyers, was fraught with irregularities.

Serrano spends his days in the corridor where the cells of the inmates awaiting the execution of the Union Correctional Institution , north of Florida, are located. The man, born in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, dreams of seeing again Cotopaxi, the second highest volcano in the country, walking slowly through a wheat field and personally meeting four of his grandchildren , as he has told him through of letters to the writer Oscar Vela, who has narrated Serrano’s story in the book Los Crimes de Bartow . Vela is also a lawyer and is part of Serrano’s defense that seeks to exhaust all resources to prevent the man from being given a date for his execution.Serrano, now 82, is the oldest man on America’s death row.

Serrano was convicted of murdering four people: first of its partners Frank Dosso and George Gonsalves. And a while later to George Patisso and his wife Diane. The couple had come to the Erie factory, in Bartow, to pick up Frank (Diane’s brother) and was allegedly murdered to prevent the Serrano from being identified.

Nelson Serrano, an Ecuadorian by birth and naturalized American, worked in 1971 at the Erie Manufacturing processing plant in Bartow , a city in Florida, United States. According to witnesses in the case,the relationship between Serrano and the victims was never the best.However, this was aggravated when USD 1 million disappeared from the company’s accounts. Nelson’s son Francisco Serrano raised the issue with Dosso and Gonsalves, while his father, Nelson, directly sued his partners in the summer of 1997. They responded with an accusation of corruption and theft.

It was then that Serrano was ousted from the Erie Manufacturing presidency by the vote of his associates, who changed the locks on the building in July 1997, five months before the murders. Shortly before, their son Francisco had also been fired.

The tense relationship between Serrano and his partners was the key point for US prosecutors to build the case. Prosecutors said Serrano was furious with Gonsalves and Felice “Phil” Dosso. During the trial, several Erie employees testified about the difficult relationships between Serrano and his partners, particularly Gonsalves.

In December 1997, the lifeless bodies of Serrano’s former associates were found at the Erie processing plant . Forensic examinations confirmed that they had been killed with firearms. The suspect from the outset was Serrano, pointed out by the victims’ relatives.Another employee of the plant, who reportedly said he wanted to assassinate Gonsalves, was never investigated.

The attention of justice remained focused on Serrano. However, he had a proven alibi for his whereabouts at the time the crimes were committed. C hen followed the murders, Serrano swears he was in Atlanta (Georgia) , on a business trip, suffering the effects of a migraine strong, so that would have been held for more than 12 hours in your hotel room. This alibi would be dismissed by the judicial authorities in charge of the case, because the prosecutors presented as evidence a half print of Serrano’s right thumb on a parking ticket at the Orlando Airport, barely two hours before the murders took place.

The jury was theorized that Serrano would have managed to leave his hotel room in Atlanta without being caught by security cameras, fly to Bartow (Florida) and return to his hotel room to be caught again by the cameras of the establishment. In nine hours and fifty-seven minutes, Serrano would have made a journey from Atlanta to Orlando, from there to Bartow, then to Tampa and again to Atlanta . Despite the lack of logic and the failure to present evidence of Serrano’s presence on a flight from Atlanta to Orlando, it was said that the defendant would have used a pseudonym to buy the flight ticket, that is, he would have flown with a False identity. Ecuadorian journalist Janeth HinostrozaHe made the same journey that Serrano is accused of having made and found that it was impossible to make those trips and have time to murder four people.

Once the “guilt” of Serrano, who would have returned to Ecuador during the evidence gathering process, was determined , he was captured by former US police officers, who took him back to the United States to serve his sentence.

Serrano has only two legal recourses left to escape the death penalty: request a new sentence before the Supreme Court of the United States or request that a federal habeas corpus be carried out that allows him to access a new trial for them to be considered. the tests that were skipped in the first process.

If his innocence is proven, Serrano’s case would be yet another with a wrong sentence that keeps a person imprisoned by mistake. According to the National Registry of Exonerations of the United States, between 1989 and 2019, more than 2,500 people have regained their freedom after having been proven innocent after spending long periods – about nine years on average – in prison.

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