The oral trial of Reynaldo Ezequiel, accused of killing his girlfriend Samara Carolina Suárez Alvarado in July 2024, opened Thursday in Tijuana with a seven-hour hearing before Judge Joel Chávez Castro. The Tijuana feminicide trial is the result of a family’s year-long fight to overturn the state prosecutor’s initial ruling that the 29-year-old woman had taken her own life, a classification that her relatives and forensic experts called impossible given the evidence at the scene.
Samara was found on the morning of July 15, 2024, by her sister Claudia in the kitchen of their home in Fraccionamiento Villa del Real III, in Tijuana’s Zona Este. She was seated at the table with food still in her mouth. She had three knife wounds to the right side of her neck, the deepest measuring 4.4 centimeters. A black cable lay on the floor behind her in a pool of blood. Strangulation marks encircled her neck. A bloodstained knife with a black handle sat on a kitchen shelf two meters away from her body.
Paramedics from the Red Cross arrived after a 6:44 a.m. police dispatch. Samara had no vital signs and was declared dead at the scene. Her body was transferred to the Servicio Médico Forense (Semefo), Tijuana’s forensic medical service, for autopsy.
FGE Initially Classified the Death as Suicide Despite Physical Evidence
The FGE, Baja California’s state attorney general’s office, opened its case file classifying Samara’s death as a suicide. That determination stood even though the forensic examiner’s own findings contradicted it. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy testified Thursday that five wounds on the right side of Samara’s neck could not have been self-inflicted. The strangulation marks were continuous and deep, inconsistent with self-harm patterns. Wounds on Samara’s hands showed she had gripped something forcefully, as if trying to pull an object away from her body.
“It is not feasible that these were self-inflicted,” the medical examiner told the court. “The ligature marks are usually incomplete in suicide cases. Hers were not.”
A forensic crime scene analyst also testified that no blood trail connected Samara’s seated position to the shelf where the knife was found. In his professional judgment, the scene was a homicide. He noted that none of the home’s three metal doors showed signs of forced entry, pointing to someone with access to the residence.
The misclassification of femicides as suicides or accidents is a documented pattern in Baja California and across Mexico. Mexico’s national femicide registry, maintained by the executive commission for attention to victims, has acknowledged that cases are routinely undercounted because prosecutors classify them as other types of death. In Baja California, advocacy groups have pushed for years to mandate femicide protocols at the scene level rather than leaving classification to prosecutors reviewing case files from their desks. Samara’s case became a public example of that failure.
Family Marches and Media Pressure Forced Reclassification
After the FGE closed the case as a suicide, Samara’s father, siblings, and extended family went public. They gave interviews to local media outlets calling the suicide finding absurd. They organized marches through Tijuana demanding the case be reclassified as femicide. In August 2024, a protest march drew public attention and put direct pressure on the FGE.
The family had identified Reynaldo Ezequiel as the primary suspect from the start. Surveillance video from neighbors’ cameras, presented Thursday in court, showed a man matching his description leaving Samara’s house wearing white gloves while she bled out inside. The footage showed him walking away, then returning briefly before leaving again at a faster pace. He wore jeans, a gray hoodie, a cap, and a black backpack.
Investigators later recovered the white gloves, now bloodstained, from a trash can near Samara’s home. A broken video game console charger was also collected from the scene. The missing section of its cable matched the black cord found near Samara’s body, the same cord prosecutors say was used to strangle her.
Under sustained public pressure, the FGE reclassified the case as femicide and obtained an arrest warrant for Reynaldo Ezequiel. Nearly two years passed between the killing and Thursday’s opening hearing.
Prosecution Plans 25 Witnesses Across Multiple Hearings
Thursday’s session included testimony from four witnesses: a responding police officer, a forensic crime scene analyst, a state investigative agent, and the medical examiner. Prosecutors presented 123 crime scene photographs and surveillance video. They told the court they plan to call 25 total witnesses in future hearings, including forensic experts, state agents, family members, friends of Samara, and others connected to the case.
The defense attorney for Reynaldo Ezequiel told the judge that her client is innocent. She called the prosecution’s evidence “subjective assessments” and stated: “Justice is not always served through conviction. Justice is also served through acquittal.” The defense did not object to any of the forensic testimony presented Thursday.
The family’s legal adviser, María Elena Chan Morales, did not appear at Thursday’s hearing despite being notified. Judge Chávez Castro fined her 2,346 pesos (roughly $130 USD) for her absence.
Samara was 29 years old, studying to become a paramedic, when she was killed while eating breakfast before work. Her sister Claudia told reporters outside the courtroom that despite the two-year wait, she trusts that Samara’s memory will be honored through the trial. The next hearing is scheduled for Friday, May 22, when family members are expected to testify. This story was first reported by Punto Norte.