?Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart? wrote the young girl Anne Frank in her diary while she and her Jewish – blooded parents were spending their lives? darkest days in one of Hitler?s infamous concentration camps during World War II.
If the global sporting public – present and future – should remember a day or a couple of days in the history of boxing in which the hearts of the passionate supporters of the sport were sent bleeding with grief and rage due to a highly disturbing event that happened outside the squared arena, it would be April 18 and 19, 2010. At dawn of April 18 in a hotel room in Valencia, Venezuela, a young and lovely housewife named Jennifer Carolina Viera de Valero was stabbed to death by her husband who was a household name in Venezuela for having made an account of himself as one of the most gifted beings to have ever laced the boxing gloves. Jennifer was 24. Reportedly, Valero, went down the hotel lobby, and confessed the crime to the hotel security personnel. Jennifer, whose death orphaned two young children, was found to have suffered from three knife attack wounds.
Appearing subdued, Valero was immediately apprehended and locked behind bars by the responding local police but less than 24 hours later, he, who made a resounding name in international boxing for his impressive dealings in the ring by which none of his 27 opponents survived the full distance was found by a fellow inmate hanging in apparent suicide. He still had the vital signs but extreme asphyxiation did not allow him to reach the hospital alive, ending his well-anticipated quest for world boxing supremacy. He was 28.
Barely a month prior to this grim incident, Valero who, during his prosperous business of running over lesser being in the squared ring had collected two major world titles ? the WBA super featherweight and the WBC lightweight belts – was embroiled in a domestic violence, also involving his wife who was rushed to a Merida hospital due to several bruises and a collapsed lung. Attending Jennifer, Valero was belligerent towards doctors and nurses, resulting to his immediate arrest and attributing his wife having accidentally fallen down a flight of stairs, he denied the authorities? accusation and was acquitted when Jennifer herself went to the side of her husband. Absolved though, Valero admitted his trouble on alcohol and drugs, prompting authorities to send him to a local psychiatric institution and in Cuba; he willingly obliged like an innocent young lad.
But, before Valero could start his fulltime six months residency in the rehabilitating hub, the most terrible incident associated to his social undoings had taken place; he killed his shy and helpless wife and in an obvious full confession to the horrible domestic murder, Valero relinquished his troubled life itself, hours later, around 1 A.M. of April 19. One of the immediate and possible reasons of his suicide was, during which little time in his prison cell, it seemed to Valero the lonely and heavy and dull corners of the prison cell started to gather in order to swallow him, like the detestations of people around the world that he should had felt to have converged on him in those dark hours
In most certain surmise, the happy thoughts of his beauteous wife and orphaned children begun to invade every conceivable parcel of his soul and all the while bringing him back to the majesty of life. But now who would take care and guide them growing up like their mother used to do? And what in the world can ever bring back the very young Jennifer to life so she can live through old age and enjoy the splendor of life that he had just rediscovered? In Valero?s mind, not a soul, so he ended up realizing how base and selfish he was.
?Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart? wrote the young girl Anne Frank in her diary while she and her Jewish – blooded parents were spending their lives? darkest days in one of Hitler?s infamous concentration camps during World War II. This famous and heartwarming and inspiring line was seemed to hold truth on Valero?s circumstance. Now in full possession of his faculty, Valero started contemplating ways on how he could tell the whole wide world there was goodness in him after all; and he wished to show such goodness by allowing himself to suffer the consequence of his crimes to the uppermost level. But spending the rest of his life perpetually agonizing in the friendless and dark world of a prison cell would have been inadequate for the wholeheartedly penitent Edwin Valero, and in his rapidly essayed opinion the last and only remedy for his predicament was quitting life itself.
