The Rising Baseball Star, a Fatal Car Crash and the Fixer
The post The Rising Baseball Star, a Fatal Car Crash and the Fixer appeared first on ProPublica .
On a desolate stretch of highway in the southern coast of the Dominican Republic, 20-year-old Luis David Saba found himself at the scene of a fatal car crash around 4 a.m. on September 21, 2020. The Jeep Grand Cherokee, with its crumpled hood, lay abandoned along with the remains of a motorcycle and its two injured passengers. The driver, Oneil Cruz, was a young ballplayer and scion of a local baseball family, with a $950,000 signing bonus from the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Saba, his younger brother Yohan, and two other victims, Deby Beato Charles and Daniela Perez Garcia, had been riding on the back of Cruz's motorcycle when it was rear-ended by the Jeep. The families of the victims held funerals in their homes later that day, and news spread about Cruz's involvement. Less than 7 miles from the accident, in Nizao, a farm town that had produced numerous professional ballplayers, a mural of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. marked the Guerrero family's legacy.
Days later, the scandal surrounding Cruz seemed to fade from the public eye, and the role of the most dominant "prestamista" in the Dominican Republic's baseball ecosystem, Santo Caraballo, was revealed.
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