A federal judge in Florida ruled on Monday there is “ample evidence” to keep a 36-year-old man — charged with kidnapping and possibly killing his wife in Spain — behind bars.
David Knezevich pleaded not guilty to the crime in June after he was arrested when he returned to Florida from his native Serbia — where he went about a week before Ana Maria Knezevich Henao’s disappearance from Madrid.
“Indeed, the evidence produced at the second hearing supports the Court’s original finding that [Knezevich] presents a serious risk of flight given the cunning level of deception that he has demonstrated as part of the crime he is alleged to have engaged in,” Judge Edwin Torres wrote in a 17-page court document, the Miami Herald reported.
Henao was last seen on February 2 at around 10 p.m. after temporarily moving to Spain, as she sought an end to her 13-year marriage. Her disappearance coincided with the sighting of an unidentified person vandalizing security cameras on the same night, as CrimeOnline reported.
Earlier, Assistant US Attorney Lacee Monk told the court that David Knezevich and his wife, Ana Maria Knezevich Henao, had been going through a nasty divorce after 13 years of marriage, WTVJ reported.
While Knezevich’s defense has said that he was in his native Serbia at the time of his wife’s disappearance, Monk told the court that security video shows Knezevich buying duct tape and spray paint at a Madrid hardward store on February 2 — the same day Henao disappeared.
She explained that the defendant flew from Miami to Turkey nearly a week before his wife disappeared and then travelled 600 miles to Serbia, where he rented a Peugeot.
Later on February, a man in a motorcycle helmet used the same brand of spray paint bought at the hardware store on Henao’s security camera, Monk said, and Knezevich’s cell phone connected to Facebook from Madrid. Further, she said, the man in the motorcycle helmet resembles the suspect with the same eyebrows and the same approximate height.
Further, she said, license plates stolen around that time in Madrid were seen on license plate readers near a motorcycle shop where an identical helmet was purchased on on Henao’s street the night she vanished. Hours after the man was seen on the security footage at Henao’s apartment, she said, a Peugeot identical to one Knezevich had rented in Serbia — and bearing the stolen license plate — went through a toll booth near Madrid.
The driver could not be seen because of tented windows.
Further, Monk said, on the morning after his wife’s disappearance, Knezevich texted a Colombian woman he had met on a dating app with two messages he wanted translated into “perfect Colombian” Spanish. She did so, and two of his wife’s friends received those messages shotly afterward from Henao’s cell phone. The messages said she was leaving with a man she’d just met.
When Knezevich returned his rented Peugeot five weeks later in Serbia, it had been driven 4,800 miles, the windows had been tinted (they weren’t at the time the car was rented), two identifying stickers had been removed, and investigators found evidence the license plate had been removed and reinstalled.
Jayne Weintraub, Knezevich’s attorney, said the prosecution was “built on assumptions.”
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[Featured image: Ana Maria Knezevich Henao/Twitter]