On August 25, 2014, Jenny Oropeza, a journalist with Diario 2001, received an intimidating message from Jonny Eduardo Bolívar Jiménez, identified as the main suspect in the March 24 homicide of Adriana Urquiola, a sign language interpreter for Noticiero Venevisión.
On August 25, 2014, Jenny Oropeza, a journalist with Diario 2001, received an intimidating message from Jonny Eduardo Bolívar Jiménez, identified as the main suspect in the March 24, 2014 homicide of Adriana Urquiola, a sign language interpreter for Noticiero Venevisión, an information program broadcast on a private TV station. The journalist said that Bolívar Jiménez asked her to stop airing information against him.
Jenny Oropeza told IPYS-Venezuela that on August 23 it was 5 months since the murder of Adriana Urquiola, as well as 5 months that her confessed assassin was still at large. Two days later, on August 25, Oropeza reported on Twitter that she was receiving intimidating messages from Jonny Bolívar telling her to stop reporting on him, or else.
In a conversation with IPYS-Venezuela, Oropeza said that a middleman, who asked not to be named, conveyed a message to her from Bolívar: “Jonny is going to pay to mess with you”. The journalist said he considers message as a direct threat from an assassin and therefore she went to the public prosecutor’s office with Urquiola’s mother to file a complaint. Luz Mely Reyes, director of Diario 2001, and Luis Domingo Álvarez, chief of Information and Opinion at FM Center, accompanied the journalist.
“The public prosecutor’s office and the CICPC (Scientific, Penal and Criminalistic Investigations Corps, a state security corps) are apprised of everything. The CICPC offered me their support, as did the public prosecutor’s office. They rose to the occasion. So far Bolívar has not messed with me again”, Oropeza quipped.
This is the second time the journalist has received intimidating messages from the confessed murderer of Urquiola. The journalist said that Bolívar had told her to “tone down” he reports linking him to the murder of the 28-year old sign language interpreter.
When the murder took place, Jenny Oropeza received a message and later a witness to the murder gave her the license plate number of the vehicle from where the shot was fired.
With that license plate number, the journalist conducted an investigation and sources gave her the name of the alleged murderer: Jonny Eduardo Bolívar Jiménez, who has a very long rap sheet and was released from jail on a judge’s orders. In the afternoon of March 24, Oropeza published Bolívar’s name on her Twitter account and from that moment on, Bolívar’s “fixation” against her began.
One week after the murder, Bolívar Jiménez confessed in an interview for El Nacional that he shot into the air on the night the interpreter died and also mentioned that a report by the CICPC revealed that one of the bullets from his gun ricocheted from a post and hit Urquiola in the head.
Oropeza filed no report about the first threats.
