The son of a former president of the Argentine Polo Association runs over a man and runs away

Cruz Ceferino Novillo Astrada, in an image shared on social networks.

A man died on Sunday around five in the morning in Buenos Aires after being hit by a truck on 9 de Julio Avenue, the most important avenue in the Argentine capital. He was 25 years old, lived on the street and the police still could not identify him because he did not have identification documents. The driver did not stop to help him and fled. Five hours later, he appeared with his lawyer at a police station. He was identified as Cruz Ceferino Novillo Astrada, 24 years old, son of Eduardo Novillo Astrada, former Polo champion and former president of the national association of that sport, and Ernestina Anchorena, landscaper and heiress of one of the most important land-owning families in Argentina. .

The circumstances of the event are still unclear. A police video shows the man crossing the avenue without traffic to the south and beginning to cross the stretch to the north while some cars moved in front of him. He did not turn to look and took a few steps right next to the pedestrian path when the truck hit him in the first lane. Novillo Astrada ran over him and dragged him for several meters until his body was lying in the middle of the avenue. The traffic continued around them.

Novillo Astrada was arrested after appearing at a police station with his lawyer and was charged with homicide. While the police investigate the incident, the story has captivated the country due to the ancestry of the driver who was investigated by Justice this Monday. His lawyer, Rafael Cúneo Libarona, spent much of this Monday speaking to the local media.

“The driver was coming from a meeting with friends, he stopped at the traffic light, in Colorado, and when he got the green light he started. The accident occurred 20 meters after the traffic light, in a place where there is no pedestrian path, that is, the pedestrian was not authorized to cross, but he suddenly crossed the motorist, who became scared,” he told the Télam agency. . In another interview, with the radio station Radio con Vos, he delved into the responsibility of the pedestrian: “This man comes walking from the opposite path, let’s say, as if he were a zombie. I don’t say it disparagingly, the image shows it. He could have been hit by cars on the way to the Obelisk, however, he keeps walking.”

“There are several reasons why he did not stop,” the lawyer justified in the radio interview. According to his defender, Novillo Astrada would have feared an assault and that is why he gave up stopping and assisting the man he had run over. Also, according to the lawyer, the bad memory of the death of his twin brother in another car accident would have affected him when making a decision. Justo Novillo Estrada died in June 2021 after crashing into a bus while driving his car in the province of Buenos Aires.

Justo, his mother said in an interview in May of this year, crashed head-on into the bus near a tollbooth about 100 kilometers north of Buenos Aires. He was 22 years old. “He had gotten the job of a lifetime, which was to be a fly fishing guide in Montana. The next day he was leaving for the United States,” Ernestina Anchorena, a landscaper and rancher, told the newspaper La Nación. Cruz had followed in the footsteps of his father, the Open champion polo player in 2003 and president of the national association of the Argentine livestock breeder’s favorite sport until mid-2021.

Cruz Novillo Astrada began playing polo in La Aguada, his paternal family’s country house, 80 kilometers from Buenos Aires. In June he had been part of a winning team in the Royal Windsor Cup, one of the most traditional and oldest tournaments in England. He now awaits the resolution of his judicial process, which the judge has allowed him to remain free.

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