CARACAS, Venezuela – Former boxing champion Edwin Valero, who had a spectacular career with 27 straight knockouts and flouted a tattoo of President Hugo Chavez on his chest, hanged himself in his jail cell Monday after being arrested for stabbing his wife to death, police said.
The former lightweight champion used the sweat pants he was wearing to hang himself from a bar in the cell, said his lawyer, Milda Mora.
Valero, 28, had problems with alcohol and cocaine addiction and struggled with depression. He had previously been suspected of assaulting his wife and was charged last month with harassing her and threatening personnel at a hospital where she was treated for injuries.
Valero's 24-year-old wife, Jennifer Carolina Viera, was found dead in a hotel room on Sunday, and police said the fighter emerged telling hotel security he had killed her.
Valero was found hanging in his cell early Monday by another inmate, who alerted authorities in the police lockup in north-central Carabobo state, Federal Police Chief Wilmer Flores told reporters. He said Valero still showed signs of life when they took him down, but they were unable to save him.
The former WBA super featherweight and WBC lightweight champion was a household name in Venezuela and had a huge image of Venezuela's president tattooed on his chest along with the country's yellow, blue and red flag.
A man whose fists carried him from poverty in a small town to fame, Valero's all-action style soon earned him a reputation as a tough, explosive crowd-pleaser, and his last victory in Mexico in February over Antonio DeMarco brought his record to 27-0 — all knockouts. Venezuelans called him "Inca," alluding to an Indian warrior, while elsewhere he was called "Dinamita," or dynamite.
Valero had a turbulent disposition and had been in trouble with the law before, for violent incidents and problems with alcohol and drugs.
Last month, he was charged with harassing his wife and threatening medical personnel who treated her at a hospital in the western city of Merida. Police arrested Valero following an argument with a doctor and nurse at the hospital, where his wife was being treated for injuries including a punctured lung and broken ribs.
The Attorney General's Office said in a statement that Valero was detained March 25 on suspicion of assaulting his wife, but his wife told a police officer her injuries were due to a fall. When the boxer arrived moments later, he forbade Viera from speaking to the police officer and spoke threateningly to the officer, prosecutors said in a statement.
A prosecutor had asked a court to keep Valero in jail, the Attorney General's Office said. But a judge instead allowed him to remain free under certain conditions including that he appear in court every 90 days, said Mora, his lawyer.
Mora told The Associated Press that after the incident Valero was held for nine days in a psychiatric hospital in Merida, where he underwent police-supervised rehabilitation. She said people close to the fighter posted bail on April 7 and he was allowed to go free.
Valero's manager, Jose Castillo, criticized authorities for failing to act more forcefully to prevent the killing.
"I asked the authorities not to let him out. He needed a lot of help. He was very bad in the head," Castillo told reporters. "But they let him out. They were very permissive with him and because of that, we're now in the middle of this tragedy."
Mora, however, said of Valero: "He was the only one responsible."
She said that the Venezuelan government had arranged for the fighter to attend a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in Cuba. He had missed a flight to Cuba earlier this month and was scheduled to fly there soon, she said.
The fighter had police escorts who were charged with protecting him. But last week he slipped away from those escorts, leaving his house near Merida with his wife and saying they were headed into town, Mora said.
Valero stayed in touch with his manager by phone but it was unclear how he and his wife turned up days later halfway across Venezuela at the hotel in Valencia, Mora said.
While police suspected Valero was battering his wife, "the only person who could report it was her, and she told her family that he never hit her," Mora said. "She wanted help for him."
Valero also "adored his wife," Mora said. "We were very close to him and we knew there could be this sort of outcome because when he became conscious of what he really had done, he wasn't going to be able to bear not being close to Carolina."
Mora described the fighter as hyperactive and said he suffered from depression. She said in jail the authorities took away his jacket and his shoelaces to prevent him from using them for a suicide attempt, and that he used his sweat pants instead.
Before his death, photographs showed Valero being led away in handcuffs, then shielding his face by pulling down his cap.
The fighter's 8-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter have been staying with their maternal grandmother, Mora said.
Valero had fought mainly in Japan and Latin America because he had trouble obtaining a license to fight in the United States. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in a motorcycle crash in 2001, and until the law was changed recently, most jurisdictions refused to grant a license to a fighter who had sustained a brain injury.
He was also charged with drunken driving in Texas, and despite efforts of his promoter, Top Rank, to secure a visa for him, the U.S. government denied his application because of the pending charges.
Valero claimed his application was denied because of politics; he was sympathetic of Chavez, a fierce critic of the U.S. government. U.S. officials say they cannot discuss individual visa cases.
Valero appeared as a special guest at events hosted by Chavez and was lionized by some of the president's supporters as a national hero, while some critics accused him of avoiding punishment for past problems due to his links to the government.
Valero's is the third high-profile suicide of a former boxing champion in the past year.
Hall of Famer Alexis Arguello, the mayor of Managua, Nicaragua, was found dead at his home in July of a gunshot wound to the chest. A few weeks later, Italian-born former super featherweight and junior welterweight champion Arturo Gatti, a naturalized Canadian, was found strangled in the Brazilian resort town of Porto de Galinhas. His wife was arrested as the prime suspect in the death, but authorities later ruled that he committed suicide.
The World Boxing Council lamented Valero's death in a statement, saying he had "happy years" in boxing and that his record will go down in boxing history. The council also said it hopes to help create a fund to pay for the education of Valero's two children.
WBC president Jose Sulaiman has said Valero was replaced as WBC lightweight champion in February after he expressed a desire to compete in a higher weight division.
Promoter Bob Arum, the founder of Top Rank who had been promoting Valero, said the fighter had never displayed such behavior and was "very polite, well spoken, sort of funny."
"It's obvious now, in retrospect, that he should have been institutionalized during this period, but it's silly to play the blame game," Arum said. "Now in retrospect, he clearly should have been getting help."
SMOLENSK, Russia/WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, its central bank head and the country's military chief were among 97 people killed when their plane crashed in thick fog near a Russian airport on Saturday.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the crash as "the most tragic event of the country's post-war history" before flying to the crash site in western Russia where he and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met and laid flowers together.
World leaders expressed shock and sorrow. U.S. President Barack Obama praised Kaczynski's role in the pro-democracy Solidarity movement that overthrew communism in 1989. Chancellor Angela Merkel said: "Germany will miss Lech Kaczynski."
Thousands of mourners flocked to the presidential palace in Warsaw and to churches across this staunchly Roman Catholic nation to lay flowers, light candles, sing hymns and pray.
Kaczynski, 60, and his entourage had been heading on board their ageing Tupolev Tu-154 to the nearby Katyn forest to mark the anniversary of the massacre of Polish officers there by Soviet forces in 1940.
Kaczynski's twin brother and close political ally Jaroslaw, head of Poland's main opposition party Law and Justice (PiS), also flew to the crash site on Saturday evening.
The deaths of President Kaczynski, many of his aides and several opposition lawmakers is a heavy blow to Poland's body politic, but analysts said they saw no threat to stability in the NATO ally and EU member state and the crash further bolsters Tusk's domination of the political scene.
"Today in the face of such a drama our nation stays united. There is no division into left and right, differences of views don't matter. We are together in the face of this tragedy," parliamentary speaker and now Poland's acting president, Bronislaw Komorowski, said in a televised address to the nation.
Komorowski said he would set the date of a presidential election which had been due in October after holding talks with Poland's political parties. Under the constitution the election must now be held by late June.
Komorowski is the presidential candidate of Tusk's ruling pro-business, pro-euro Civic Platform (PO). Opinion polls suggest he would have defeated Kaczynski in the election.
PILOT ERROR?
The pilot of the plane ignored several orders not to land from air traffic control, the deputy chief of the Russian Air Force's general staff, Alexander Alyoshin, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Local officials said the plane had clipped treetops on its way down.
Kaczynski, a combative nationalist often at odds with Tusk's centrist government and the EU, was a staunch critic of Putin's Russia. Putin had invited Tusk, not Kaczynski, to ceremonies earlier in the week marking the Katyn massacre anniversary.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to the Polish nation in an unprecedented television address. Russia has declared April 12 a day of mourning for the crash.
Poles will hold two minutes of silence at noon (9 a.m. British time) on Sunday. Komorowski has declared a week of mourning in Poland.
Russian television showed the smouldering fuselage and fragments of the plane scattered in a forest. A Reuters reporter saw a broken wing some distance from the rest of the aircraft.
The plane was one of two Tu-154s in the government fleet, both about 20 years old. Government officials had complained about the age of Poland's official aircraft.
Smolensk regional governor Sergei Antufyev said there were no survivors of the crash. The Emergencies Ministry said the bodies of the victims would be transported to Moscow for investigation.
"The pilot was advised to fly to Moscow or Minsk because of heavy fog, but he still decided to land. No one should have been landing in that fog," one Russian official told Reuters, on condition his name was not published.
Polish Justice Minister Krzysztof Kwiatkowski said Warsaw planned an inquiry into the crash. Medvedev said Russian investigators would cooperate with the Polish side.
CENTRAL BANK CONTINUITY
Kaczynski, 60, was a one-time ally of Solidarity hero Lech Walesa and a co-founder of the right-wing PiS with his brother. He resigned from the party when he became president in 2005 but continued to support it.
While the president's role is largely symbolic, the holder can veto government legislation. Kaczynski had infuriated Tusk's government several times by blocking legislation including health sector reform.
Among the other casualties of the crash were Kaczynski's wife Maria, along with Slawomir Skrzypek, 47, who had been central bank governor since 2007, the chief of Poland's military Franciszek Gagor and Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Kremer.
Analysts said Polish markets would not be severely jolted. "Although tragic, we do not believe that this event threatens political and financial stability in Poland in any fundamental way," Goldman Sachs said in a research note.
Some relatives of victims of the Katyn massacres also were on board, said a Polish government official in Smolensk.
"I'm all broken up ... it cannot be expressed in words," said Ewa Robaczewska, a mourner outside the presidential palace.
(Additional reporting by Robin Paxton, Guy Faulconbridge, Maria Kiselyova, Dmitry Sergeyev and Conor Humphries in Moscow; Agata Nalecz, Patryk Wasilewski, Chris Borowski and Gareth Jones in Warsaw; Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Michael Roddy)
