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“Why was Hernán killed? Why, sir?” , asks the mother. Her daughter, Hernán's sister, hugs her while she cries. And her husband asks questions, no doubt, he doesn't know what to say. He stretches his arms, as if desperate, and sighs. When Hernán Macias López was found in the bathtub of his room, at the Nuevo Milenio hotel in the Prado Centro neighborhood, in Medellín, it was too late to try anything. The bundle of feet and hands, the mouth gagged and the gesture of the pierced face, was picked up hours later by forensics. Hotel employees could not find records that could account for who her killer had been because, apparently, none of them had taken the trouble to make sure that her name had been correctly added to the guest list. If they did, they had the wrong name. He would have made fun of them. None of them remember even a small feature of the murderer's face. The authorities were told that they saw him leave quickly during the early morning and he seemed suspicious, but they did nothing, until the next morning.
“I feel a butterfly in my stomach and I see pink unicorns,” he had said to himself, a few days earlier, smiling in the mirror and pressing the button on his phone to take the picture. At that time, he would not have been able to anticipate his death the following Thursday. Hernán Macías Lopez was not yet 30 years old when someone decided to kill him in the hotel room where he was staying. Today, his Instagram account, where in one of his last posts he wrote these words, is a mausoleum that displays the photographs of a ghost who smiles and shows his torso proudly.
“Why did you die, Hernán? , the mother asks herself, again and again, as she hopes that her son will respond from wherever he has gone. She won't, she knows, but she still asks. They can't understand, either of them, why what happened, why they killed Hernán. “He was a good person who didn't mess with anyone,” they say. “I didn't have a problem with anyone.”
The murder was recorded on March 31. It appeared in the press, we reviewed it in Infobae, and at that time no news was known from people close to Macías López. I myself took care of tracking him down, trying to find someone who could give me more details about who he had been and why, all of a sudden, he died like this. It seemed as if there was no one who knew him, as if he had been, at least for the last few years, a loner away from everyone, dedicated to loving men. The only details were those: that he had studied on the Seine, that he worked as a vigilante, that he was friendly, that he was gay. There was nothing else. No one gave a reason that went further.
Macias Lopez had spent his last days with who, apparently, had been his most recent partner. A man with a dark face and a long smile who hugged him and took him by the hand. “You,” Macias said. You don't know anything about him, he hasn't said anything. Macias Lopez's brother-in-law said he was an excellent person, very decent, dedicated to his family. He believes that the murder of the young man could have occurred because of some conflict of homophobia, because neither drugs nor bad business was he involved.
The mother's cry welcomes everyone, infects them, fills them with pain. “He was good. They didn't have to kill him,” says the sister, who rubs tears all over her face. “Hernán wanted to buy my mom a house. I didn't want to see her suffer, or pay rent. It was his dream.” Macias Lopez had left Florence for Medellin in the spirit of achieving a better fortune. When he was 28 years old, he took the family and, somehow, chose to get away so that he could be him with greater freedom. “Now they're killing them for homosexuals,” they say. “They've always been killed for that.”
Macias Lopez's killer hasn't been identified yet. The family tries to recover from the death of an aunt who died just a day before the young man, and they wait for the body that is still owned by the authorities to be handed over to them. They call for justice and demand that homicide not go unpunished. The last time the young man was seen was in October 2021. “It looked good, healthy,” says the mother. “I don't know why this happened to him.” The woman had given birth to him inside a house where four brothers were born. “They tore a piece out of me,” he says. “He left because he wanted to be better.” And maybe he succeeded, that's what you should think about, beyond pain. Maybe he was happy in those last days, and maybe he left this world with that question: Is that how it ended?
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