It was a brutal onslaught one weekend night on one of those multi-lane avenues that cross São Paulo, Brazil’s economic capital. A speeding Porsche 911 Carrera GTS brutally rammed a humble Renault Sandero. The driver of the car, Ornaldo da Silva Viana, 52, who earned his living by driving endlessly for Uber, suffered cardiorespiratory arrest and died shortly after in the hospital. The other driver was Fernando Sastre de Andrade Filho, a 24-year-old businessman who had gone out to party in his father’s sports car and was returning home with a friend. The controversy over the event, which occurred on March 31, is still alive because it offers a good portrait of the privilege enjoyed by the rich (and white) in a country as unequal as Brazil. The police have requested for the third time that Sastre, accused of intentional homicide and escape, be placed in preventive detention, according to the Brazilian press.
In a country where you sometimes see mixed-race or black men against the wall in the middle of the street being frisked or guarded by police officers, white (and rich) privilege was evident from the first moments after the crash, after two o’clock in the morning. early morning of Easter Sunday.
The mother of the Porsche driver showed up at the scene of the accident, met her son and convinced the two military police officers present that she needed to take him to the hospital for an X-ray. So, against any protocol in those circumstances, the police allowed the main suspect to leave the crime scene without submitting to a breathalyzer test. Although with some reluctance, as the recordings from her body cameras show, the police trusted the woman’s word.
When the agents showed up at the hospital where Sastre Filho was supposed to have been taken by his mother, surprise, neither he nor she were there. They went to his apartment, either. It took almost two days for the accused to appear at a police station.
Little by little, other details came to light that fueled popular indignation in a country where the super-rich are a separate breed, and where 1.5 million people make a living or round out their salaries by driving for clients of applications like Uber. And everything, aggravated by the attitude of the police on the night of the event. It turns out that the young construction businessman who destroyed his father’s bright blue car had lost his driving license for various violations, including fines for speeding. When he hit the Uber driver that morning, it had only been 12 days since he had regained his license.
The co-driver of the Porsche, a friend of Sastre Filho, was seriously injured: four broken ribs and his spleen had to be removed. When he recovered enough to testify to police, he told investigators that the driver of the sports car had been drinking that night. Both had spent together, and with their respective partners, an evening that ended with some poker games and a fight between the twenty-something businessman and his girlfriend, who did not consider him fit to get behind the wheel.
Viana, who was working as an Uber driver that night, had the bad luck to cross his path. That was his job and he was proud of it. The father of three children, he was married and a religious man, someone with whom he easily empathized with the majority of Brazilians who go out to work every morning to earn, with enormous effort, in very long days, the sustenance to support their families. “Hello family, let’s go to the fight. Everything is in order, let’s see what the good Lord sends us today, he always sends good races. Excellent work. God is going to bless our work tonight,” Viana tells his family in a video that she released after his death.
To make matters worse, two street surveillance cameras at the scene were not working that morning. According to the police, they were in the process of updating technology. Although the man accused of homicide declared to the police that he was going “a little above” the 50 kilometers per hour allowed on the avenue, the police investigation has determined that Sastre had stepped on the accelerator very hard. The Porsche was flying at more than 150 kilometers per hour. The collision was brutally violent. The rear part of the Renault Sandero was completely compressed.
In view of the escape and the circumstances of the accident, the police have requested for the third time that Sastre Filho be provisionally imprisoned, seize his passport and suspend his driver’s license. The case is under summary secrecy but the leaks are constant. The second time the police asked him to go to prison, the judge allowed him to avoid jail with a bail of half a million reais ($97,000).
This case is reminiscent of another rich boy. Businessman Eike Batista was the man of the moment, the one who embodied Brazil’s success when, in 2012, his first-born son, named Thor, ran over and killed a cyclist on a mountain road in Rio de Janeiro. He fell out of favor with the Lava Jato plot. When he knocked over a truck driver who was riding a bike, Thor was 22 years old. A few months before, the police had confiscated a Ferrari for driving without a front license plate; he was known for spending lavishly at night in Rio. Convicted in the first instance, he was later acquitted and his family compensated the victim’s. Four months later, he was back behind the wheel.
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América in Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
.
.
_