"Bartow's crimes" (by chapters) |THE VIEWER

Those convicted of death say that this place is the closest thing to hell.They say that there, in the confinement, you live every day as if it were the last.They say that this chorus "Dead Man Walking", "Dead Man Walking", becomes a constant nightmare from the day you enter for the first time in that pavilion and the security guards receive you with their cynical faces, smiling some and perfidiousothers, with those three words wrapped in a macabre intonation.And then, they finish off their welcome leading you to visit the site where one day they will execute you, a gloomy room with a view to the auditorium from which their occupants will see you die.

That morning, we undertook our way to the Union Correctional Institution Penitentiary Center, the maximum security prison in which Nelson Serrano has been held since 2006 when Susan Roberts, a judge of the Bartow court, imposed four death penalties.

A long journey on the highways of the state of Florida took us from Sarasota, a beautiful city located next to the Gulf of Mexico, to the bleak Bartow, and then from Gainesville to the town of Raiford, north of the state of Florida.

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In my mind, a phrase that I read the previous night in an anthology of stories and stories by Argentine writer Juan José Saer: "Volunteer or involuntary, memory does not reign about the memory: it is rather its servant".I know that these words were recorded by the excessive fear that has assaulted me for years in the face of the possibility of losing my memory and becoming an unbearable load, into a dispossession with their latent vital signs unfortunately from my loved ones.In a maniath and silent way, in addition to daily reading, I started working mentally with certain basic exercises: mathematical calculations, word games and, above all, remote memories that I review again and again from the first years of childhood (Maybe between three and four years) to keep them diaphanous and alive.Every day I travel to some point in the past to rescue these images, smells, flavors or normally trivial episodes that have been part of oblivion for years and that, now, return more strongly, with greater intensity, for my comfort.I can't even imagine that fate, capricious and indecipherable, will bring this phrase of Saer to my mind when I see Nelson Serrano and talk to him.

In addition to recording all the conversations we have with Francisco Serrano, I take notes in a notebook that I have since the beginning of the case.Here, chaotic, at incomprehensible moments, there are references about what I see, listen or attract my attention, even some sensations that fall on me these days during the trip, such as the questions that embark on me before I meet Nelson Serrano remarked withVarious interrogation signs.The night before visiting the death corridor, after dinner, already in the room, we talked to Stefi about these shared sensations.We both still have many doubts about this case, although the visit to Erie Manufacturing and conversation with Francisco has helped us better understand the facts.We share, in particular, a huge question about that man who has spent eighteen years locked up for a crime that claims not to have committed.

We also talk to my wife about Nelson Serrano's superb posture in the videos of the trial and we still share certain doubts about his participation in the crime, not as a material author, because the evidence on the presence of at least two people are clear, butYes, as one of the suspects of being the intellectual author, although Francisco has told us this afternoon about the money of the companies has partially dissipated our suspicion.

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We know, because they had anticipated it, that we will enter the prison without any of the devices that today are so useful to treasure memories: a recorder, a cell phone, a personal computer ... Current life seems impossible without at least one of these gadgetsof those who have become so dependent and that it will not be possible to take in our visit to the death corridor.In another note of my notebook, which proves my frightening calligraphy, with effort, I decipher another phrase from Saer that I wrote last night and has connection with the first: “… the memory is complex matter.Memory is not enough to grab it ".The possibility of entering without a phone and without notebook to that visits room overwhelms me at that time.We will appeal, therefore, to the memory of Stefi and mine to retain the greatest amount of data and information about what happens during those hours that we will share with Nelson Serrano, and, perhaps, hopefully, to the brief notes that we can do thereIn small recycled papers that will deliver the security guards.

Francisco drives the vehicle again.Our conversation is interrupted around nine in the morning, when we are approaching prison in the middle of a thick fog and a persistent drizzle.It is a disturbing Sunday for Stefi and for me.

As soon as we enter the parking lot of the Correctional Institution Union, among the mist that dissipates slowly, the spectral buildings that make up this penitentiary center appear.While we park the vehicle, Francisco tells us that he visits his father in prison at least once a month, always on Sunday, which is the day set for the inmates of the death corridor.When we get out of the car we protect ourselves from the cold.We leave all our personal effects in the glove compartment.We barely have some money to buy food at the Viewers Room Bar.

The first thing that catches our attention are the constructions of the complex, rectangular and dreary, mostly painted gray and a pale yellow the maximum security.And, of course, we are impacted by the wired tangles that surround the place between two parallel metal fences, topped by the upper part with several deterrent lines with high voltage cables.

Our presence in the death corridor has been authorized several weeks in advance, so that in the first filter the guards verify the identities of each.Francisco is a regular visitor and knows the procedure, but for my wife and for me that is the first visit to an American prison, and although we have followed this case closely, it is also the first time we will see Nelson Serrano in person.

The two documentaries that were filmed on their case, the first of the CBS, who clearly instill in Serrano, shows it as a serial killer and discovers Tommy Ray, the police officer who was in charge of the investigation,of Bartow's crimes as the hero of history;And also the work of Janeth Hinostroza, a research journalist who nakes the corrupt system of US justice, criticizes the death penalty as an institution and tries to demonstrate the impossibility of Serrano had committed crimes, according to Ray's theory and the theory of Ray andProsecutor's Office.The two are fundamental to understand the different faces that the same story can have, and, above all, to discover the gaps and inconsistencies that wrapped the theory elaborated by Ray and taken to the Court by the prosecutors John Agüero and Paul Wallace.On these two audiovisual works and its protagonists we will return later, then, for now, when Stefi and I are about to enter as visitors in the death corridor, we have the same concerns: the first, related to the place we will visit and, more specifically, with our security in there.We have prevented those who visited Nelson Serrano before the way we must act, and, above all, my wife has suggested that she dressed in baggy clothes, with nothing striking in her garments, because we will share a small room with about fifteenor twenty detainees, all accused of homicide in the first degree.This concern fades when we cross the first security filters and the guards review us and treat us seriously and professionalism.The second concern, on the other hand, is the perception that we both have about Nelson Serrano before knowing it personally, a perception accentuated by the images we had seen of him during the trial that ended up finding him guilty.During the journey we revealed some of this to Francisco, because we both had the feeling that in the Nelson Serrano trial he had been superb, almost high in his gestures in front of the jury, in front of the judge and especially in front of the familyof the victims.In fact, we have commented with Francisco that in our opinion that image of his father could have a negative effect on the jury's decision and, without a doubt, he had it on the judge that, in addition, although it sounds strange and absurd, he was a co -workerof one of the victims: Diane Patisso.

—A innocent man, in those circumstances and under legal advice, he had to be undone, humble, affected by a case that could lead him to be executed, and yet your father's attitude during the trial was surprisingly arrogant ...

Given this vision, and without hiding your surprise, Francisco responds:

"My father is like that.He is a man who never lets himself be defeated, and now that you tell me this I realize that yes, that during the trial he looked strong because he was never going to show himself another way before Phill Dosso, his ex -partner who had taken himto that place with your accusations;However, I remind you that, because of his deafness, he listened to what was said in court for a moment later, through a computer, so that his reactions did not match exactly what we heard.

After a few seconds of reflection, Francisco concludes:

—In addition, my father and the lawyers were so confident about the evidence they had in their favor, and especially confident for the evidence that the Prosecutor's Office did not have to accuse him, that we all act with the certainty that he would be declared innocent ...

In any case, although I do not tell him, I think that his lawyers had not only been confident that the trial seemed simple for the defense, but also acted in a suspiciously negligent way.This idea spins me now that we are all three inside the maximum security pavilion of Raiford prison.

After crossing the first access doors, we walk through an outer corridor completely covered by bars, a kind of cage forged with iron and spike wire.In the courtyards of the detention center, at a distance, we distinguish a group of prisoners dressed in blue suits.They are convicts for common crimes that remain separated from the death corridor.

Finally, we arrive at the visiting room of the maximum security pavilion.In its exterior appearance it is not very different from the others, although there are only those who have committed atrocious crimes, mostly homicides in the first degree.In these days the population of the death corridor is just over two hundred and twenty prisoners, but this section is enabled to house four hundred people in unipersonal cells there.