A convicted man killed his consensual partner and a mutual friend inside a vehicle on Sunday night, November 8, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and then took his own life with a firearm at his home on Calle Almendro in the Sombras Real neighborhood, police said. Authorities were alerted at 10:30 PM through the 9-1-1 Emergency System to a woman wounded by gunfire.
Inspector Daniel Justiniano, director of the Ponce Criminal Investigations Corps (CIC), told Primera Hora that officers found the armed man on the second floor of the residence and that he fired several shots at them; the officers returned fire. The man barricaded himself inside, and a negotiator and a S.W.A.T. team were called in to try to persuade Rey Luis Torres Roche, 39, to surrender.
He repeated that he would not return to prison, "that he did not want to serve," and took his own life. The feminicide protocol was activated. Torres Roche was sentenced in February 2024 to nine years of probation in a case of lewd acts against a minor under 16 and appears in the Sex Offender Registry.
The bodies of Jazmine Rivera Roca, 47, and her compadre Gerardo Santiago Santiago, 49, were found shot inside a white Suzuki Aerio owned by the woman. Justiniano said all three had known each other since childhood and had gone out together before the tragedy. No domestic violence complaint or protection order appears in the Police information system.
Agent Danny Valentín Rivera, assigned to the Ponce Homicide Division, and prosecutor Alexandra Aulet Morales investigated the scene. According to preliminary Police statistics, 32 women have been killed so far this year, ten in domestic violence incidents, compared with 37 feminicides reported by this date last year. With the double killing, nine have occurred during this weekend.
The same neighborhood was the scene of the intimate feminicide of Lourdes del Carmen Cuevas Natal, a 42-year-old medical technologist and businesswoman stabbed to death in June 2019 by her ex-partner Javier José Acevedo Rodríguez.