⚖️🔍 Who Drew the Ballistic Fiction?

Where was Ahumada really standing when the shots were fired? Certainly not where the police artists say. Both the PDI and Carabineros had access, within the same investigation, to video footage of the scene showing that Ahumada was not next to the traffic light or the back of the pickup truck. If they reviewed that footage and still drew Ahumada in that position, the location was invented. If they didn't review it before issuing an expert report used to convict, that constitutes serious negligence for forensic experts. Neither alternative is acceptable.

Question for Prosecutor Paola Rojas: why was an officer with no ballistics certification — Captain Guzmán, from a vehicle-search section — allowed to determine and testify at trial to a "bullet impact" angle, instead of requiring an independent ballistics expert from the start? Was the Prosecutor afraid that a certified ballistics expert, examining the evidence independently, would take apart the case theory?

The defense's theory on Molina's damage: according to John Cobin, the radiator damage was likely self-inflicted opportunistically, possibly with a crowbar. Molina kept his vehicle for more than two months before reporting the damage — only after Captain Jorge Guzmán Rojas (Vehicle Search Section) declared it a "bullet impact" — with no chain of custody for the vehicle during that period. Furthermore, the entry hole is irregular, roughly 25 mm tall by 19 mm wide — dimensions and shape incompatible with a .40-caliber (10.6 mm) projectile, which should produce a smooth, round hole, not an irregular gash.

Molina (radiator, 52.3 m): the same 15° ricochet, and the same violation of physics. The report attributes the damage to Molina's radiator to a ricochet rising ~15° from an incidence of barely ~1°–2°, fired from 52.3 m. That breaks two laws at once: the law of reflection, which for an elastic bounce requires exit angle = entry angle; and conservation of energy, which forbids the exit angle from being greater than the entry angle — a real ricochet loses energy and comes out flatter, never steeper. Going from ~2° to 15° is a 7-to-15-fold jump, as if the bullet had gained energy on hitting the pavement.

At a 15° climb, the bullet rises more than 1.3 meters within the first 5 meters of flight — far above a radiator, which sits nearly at ground level — long before covering a fraction of the reported 52.3 m. A ricochet actually consistent with the declared incidence (~1°–2°, as physics requires) would rise only ~0.9–1.8 m over the full 52.3 m: geometrically possible, yes, but not the angle LABOCAR and Captain Guzmán Rojas declared. They needed the 15° for the story to work, not because physics backed it up.

Ahumada (thigh, 1.62 m / 3.43 m): the geometry demands an even more impossible angle — and explains why there was never a ricochet mark. Ahumada was 1.62 m from Cobin according to the PDI, or 3.43 m according to LABOCAR. Cobin was seated in the cab, with the muzzle about 1 m off the ground; the wound is at 72 cm height. If the bullet touched the pavement at some midpoint and rose again — as the ricochet theory requires — the law of reflection requires the downward and upward angles to be equal. Solving the geometry under that condition (connecting the muzzle height to the wound height within each reported distance), the required angle is ~46.7° (PDI distance) or ~26.6° (LABOCAR distance). For the Ahumada case, LABOCAR and PDI never state what incidence angle would have produced that 15° ricochet — the figure simply doesn't exist in the case file, any more than the pavement ricochet mark does. But even using as a reference the only incidence angle that appears anywhere in the whole case — the ~1°–2° declared for Molina's radiator, at 52.3 m — the difference is 13 to 47 times over. And a 46.7° ricochet falls squarely in the 45°–90° range in which, as the high-speed video below shows, the projectile is destroyed or fragments on impact — it doesn't stay intact to pass through a thigh at 72 cm height.

No ricochet is even needed to explain the wound: a simple straight line from the muzzle (~1 m) to the thigh (72 cm), never touching the ground, requires only ~9.8° of decline at 1.62 m, or ~4.7° at 3.43 m — an ordinary, direct shot. The absence of a ricochet mark in both scenes isn't an investigative oversight: it's the absence of physical evidence for a ricochet that, by the case's own physics, would have had to be far more violent than LABOCAR and PDI are willing to admit.

Try any firing angle: none of them solve the problem. Cobin seated, muzzle ~1 m off the ground. If he fires at 26.6° — the angle that does connect the LABOCAR distance of 3.43 m to the thigh — at the PDI distance of 1.62 m the bullet is still ~19 cm off the ground: ankle or shoe height, not thigh height. To then still reach 72 cm would require a second, nearly vertical ricochet, of about ~85°–90°, on the final stretch — something no ballistic ricochet produces.

If he instead fires at 60°, pavement impact occurs just ~0.58 m from Cobin, leaving ~2.85 m (LABOCAR) or ~1.04 m (PDI) to Ahumada. There, geometrically, an exit angle under 60° — ~14° or ~35° — would in fact reach the thigh, satisfying the law of reflection (exit ≤ entry). But a 60° incidence falls squarely in the 45°–90° range in which, as the high-speed video below shows, the projectile is destroyed or fragments on impact — unless it were a stainless-steel bullet, not the conventional ammunition in this case.

And there's an additional problem, independent of whichever ricochet angle is chosen: the case file itself describes the thigh wound channel as sloping upward at barely ~12°. A bullet arriving at the nearly vertical trajectory (~85°–90°) of the first scenario would have to turn in mid-flight to the ~12° of the wound channel before entering the tissue — and a projectile has no wings or engine to make that turn.