“Holy Virgin, they give lead. My God. There is an injured policeman. My God”, we hear in a video recorded by a truck driver, in the afternoon of Wednesday, March 15, in which a violent confrontation took place on the road that connects Ocaña with Aguachica, in Cesar.
According to preliminary versions, armed criminals carried out an attack on a stock car and a police patrol. The vehicle was carrying a large sum of money, which would have motivated the attack.
“We need support for our partner who is injured.” “I need to locate the target.” “They must be hidden,” the men in uniform said as they were attacked, video shows.
The facts were recorded in several videos that were shared on social media. In one of them, you can see a policeman lying on the ground and several of his colleagues sheltering from the shots that the criminals were firing in the area. We also hear one of the attendants of the stock car say goodbye to his companions, believing that he was going to lose his life there.
The bodyguard, who died after the attack, answered to the name of Leandro Andrés Trigos Vanegas and was 34 years old. Trigos was hit in the right leg by a bullet, causing a femoral vein injury, according to the medical report. The man checked in in his final minutes and waved goodbye to his team mates saying, ‘Bye guys, bye you’re not gonna see me again, laughing, bye’ then the man walked away is made to cry.
According to eyewitness accounts, the man was rescued and received medical treatment at a hospital in Ocaña. However, at 8:00 p.m. on March 15, the bodyguard died during the operation after going into cardiac arrest. Juan Carlos Sierra, a doctor at the Emiro Quintero Cañizares de Ocaña Hospital, recorded the man’s admission to the care center as follows:
“He walked into the trauma room, he was assessed by doctors on the ward, who determined the need for an airway and to be assessed by general surgery. After that, he was transferred due to high risk and hemodynamic instability of the compromised lower limb. He is in the operating room under procedure,” he reported, quoted in The spectator.
For his part, the person in charge of certifying the death was the doctor Antonio Jose Monroy, who said the shots left the security guard with multiple injuries to his femur, tibia, patella, artery, veins and collateral vessels. After arriving at the hospital, Trigos underwent a shock severe hypovolemic disease, and “fluid resuscitation was performed and the patient was intubated due to the heavy bleeding he induced,” explained Dr Monroy
This is not the first incident of this type recorded in the region in recent days. A few days ago, on March 13, a crossfire was reported at a branch of Banco Agrario in the same neighborhood of Cesar. On this occasion, there was also a confrontation between criminals and uniformed officers who tried to prevent the theft. Despite the fact that the shooting invaded the municipality for several minutes, no deaths or injuries were reported.
Colonel Luis León, commander of the police of Cesar, warned about this case that “In the face of the criminal act, the effective action of the uniformed officers prevents the theft of the main safe of the Agrarian Bank of the municipality, which was the main objective of the delinquents, who manage to make some money from the box office”.
Despite the confrontation between the authorities and the criminals, they managed to flee. The police announced that they were carrying out investigations to find the location of this criminal group.