A heated affair that ended in tragedy is now part of a $10 million lawsuit.
The family of Vanesa Itzel Rodriguez Chavarria, who died in 2014, is seeking justice from the United States in a federal wrongful-death lawsuit filed Friday in New York.
Three years ago, Rodriguez Chavarria, a young woman from Panama, began a relationship with Master Sgt. Omar Velez-Pagan, a married US soldier assigned to that Central American nation to help train its police officers.
But their affair was cut short when Velez-Pagan, drunk and jacked up on steroids, half-buried his lover’s body in a ditch near a Panamanian farm after a violent encounter with her.
The two had been arguing when Velez-Pagan, who carried on multiple extramarital relationships during his deployment to Panama, pummeled Rodriguez Chavarria, then 25, during an argument inside a US Embassy-owned Toyota Hi-Lux he was driving.
“She actually hit me in the face,” Velez-Pagan testified at his murder trial, according to The Fayetteville Observer. “I punched her back. In the face.”
He claimed Rodriguez Chavarria had gotten out of the car during their squabble and the vehicle hit her accidentally, according to the report.
But the young woman’s blood stained the inside of the car, which a panicked Velez-Pagan then used “to repeatedly run over the body of [Rodriguez Chavarria] to cover up the murder to make it appear her death was caused by a traffic accident,” her family said in court papers filed against her killer as well as the US Army and the Department of Defense.
Velez-Pagan was sentenced in 2016 by a military court to 30 years in prison for the June 23, 2014, killing.
The woman’s father detailed the crime in an emotional letter to then-President Barack Obama posted on Facebook the year before Velez-Pagan’s trial.
“After savagely beating her to death, he repeatedly ran a car over her body, then dug a pit in order to [bury] and conceal the body and the evidence,” Rogelio Rodriguez wrote.
The grieving dad slammed the US for initially getting Velez-Pagan out of Panama.
“Mr. President, you cannot talk about democracy and respect for human rights if your government permits this type of abuse,” he wrote in 2015.
The family calls the murder “and cruel treatment” of their daughter a violation of international law. The Army declined comment.