Jossy takes off his jacket, revealing the bullet’s entry hole, on the inside of his arm, practically at armpit level. She doesn’t have an exit scar, which means the projectile is still in there. Of the 16 bullets that hit the Dodge Durango van, two of them hit her. The first, glancing: she scraped his forehead and left his face ostentatiously bloody but without consequences. The second is this one that she has encapsulated not far from her humerus and that causes pain that reaches her back.
As the autopsy would later detail, her husband, Eyerberth (Eyer) Verdú, 35, who was in the driver’s seat, received six impacts. Jossy Díaz, 36, remembers what she saw when she opened her eyes once the shooting stopped. We are in Tijuana (Mexico), February 16, 2022. “I saw him lying on the seat, he had fallen towards me. I got out, tried to open his door but I couldn’t, my arm hurt a lot, but I didn’t know I thought I had a bullet out of place. I was trying to get Eyer out of the car and I couldn’t. Then I saw the wound in his neck. A woman and a man were yelling at me from a distance: ‘Don’t move, you! wait wait…!'”.
Seconds before they were riddled with bullets, Jossy and the late Eyer talked excitedly about the future. They had known for three days that they were expecting their second child. When the Mexican police arrived at the scene of the crime and saw a child’s seat sewn with bullets in the back seats, they asked in anguish where the kid was. Charity, an earthquake of two years and five months who does not stop running around the flat where we are in Madrid, was safe with her grandmother.
They killed Jossy’s husband and she, fearing that the murderers wanted to finish off the survivor, urgently fled to Spain, a nationality she has because her paternal grandfather was from the Canary Islands. She set off the alarms of the metal detector at the Cancun airport, showed the bandage on her arm and the X-ray with the bullet inside her and managed to board and land in Barajas on March 14.
And here she is, a widow, with a little girl, a belly of almost six months now, and a desperate situation. A friend has given her temporary accommodation in a tiny flat in the Vallecas neighborhood: the friend and her partner sleep in one room, the friend’s in-laws in the other, and Jossy and her daughter on the sofa.
You can stay with them until this May 30th. All his capital adds up to 200 euros. She looks for a job, but can’t find anyone to hire her in her state. “I’ve asked the City Council for a place in a center. ‘We’ll put you on the waiting list, be patient, be patient’. But time is running out for me. The baby is going to arrive soon, and what do I do? I’m almost there I have no money left, what do I do? Fundación Madrina, which supports single mothers, is helping her by providing food and healthcare.
Jossy has a two-year-old daughter and is pregnant: “The baby is coming soon and I hardly have any money left”
The reader may wonder why Jossy and her husband’s vehicle was attacked. Let’s first briefly review the biographies of her before returning again to the event. Both were born in Venezuela. He was an escort for President Hugo Chávez, but decided to leave the military and went to study in Cuba on a scholarship. He graduated in Physical Culture and Sport. She also has a university degree in Social Communication. They got married in 2015 and the following year they decided to leave the country. “We wanted to come to Spain, but we didn’t have enough money and we went to Mexico,” says Jossy.
Eyer had a passion for dogs and turned professionally towards dog training. He set up a company and began to offer his services at home. He trained the dogs in basic obedience, in advanced protection, in explosives detection… And he was in contact with the Police to train dogs for drug detection. Tijuana is on the border with the US. In 2020, the battles between the drug cartels left 2,005 dead in the city.
Eyer worked with the dogs by day and was an armed security guard at a shopping center by night. Jossy was employed at an online jewelry sales company. That February 16, he went to pick her up at her work. “I had not been paid my salary and he had lent money that was not returned to him. We were short of money and he had not put gas in the car.”
Halfway home, the tank ran out and they were left stranded on the side of a highway. They had been waiting three quarters of an hour for some friends they had called to help them. “Shots started coming back and forth. Eyer said something to me but I don’t know what. I slid down in the seat. A bullet grazed my head and my glasses fell off.” They had been shot at from a moving vehicle. Jossy couldn’t see the attacker(s).
Since the Police did not find any connection between Eyer and drug trafficking or any other dirty business, it was concluded that the attack must have been a mix-up caused by the signs that the dog handler had stamped on the vehicle: in the front window, the name of the company in large red letters; in the rear windows, K9 -as dogs trained for police, rescue or protection work are known- in the same color. They drew a lot of attention because the car was black and had tinted windows. “Because we had been waiting so long, they must have thought we were looking for something, that we had dogs to look for drugs,” explains Jossy.
Taken to hospital, doctors tried to remove the bullet. “We can’t give you anesthesia because of the pregnancy, it stays there,” they told her. Days later they arrested a kid who had a weapon that matched the shell casings collected from the crime scene. Police asked Jossy to see a medical examiner. The bullet she was carrying in her arm was the most complete and they wanted to compare it with the seized weapon.
In the second attempt, extraction was not possible either. “The boy had been arrested for drugs. Then the inspector from the public ministry told me: ‘Do you want to confirm the trial? Look, you are a woman alone with a girl, a foreigner… It is recommended that you leave because it is not known if It’s a cartel and they’re going to come after you.
And Jossy chose the flight that has brought her to Madrid. “God does things for a reason and I know I’m going to survive. I can work at anything. I’ve been a waitress, a receptionist, an assistant, an event planner… I can decorate children’s parties, I have pastry courses.”
His friends have opened the “A Chance for Jossy” campaign on Gofundme to try to raise funds: https://gofund.me/3969b4b7.
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