Commonwealth of Virginia v. Jimi Argedis Salgado

Manassas, Virginia, criminal defense lawyer represented the Defendant charged with malicious wounding.



Ilka McCoy and Salgado were in a romantic relationship and lived together until May 2021. By August 2021 they had broken up, lived separately, and McCoy was dating Oscar Lucas. Nevertheless, McCoy and Salgado contacted each other "every couple days" in an effort to remain friends and because McCoy was still receiving Salgado's mail. On August 16, 2021, Salgado texted McCoy while she was at work, indicating that he wanted to see her. She agreed to visit him at his house after work. McCoy arrived at Salgado's house at around 8:00 p.m. and parked her car behind Salgado's vehicle across the street. Salgado met her at the door and the two walked into his bedroom, where she placed her keys and her purse before crossing the hallway to enter the bathroom. As she was leaving the bathroom, she heard a knock on the front door, and then she heard Lucas say, "Is Jimi home?" McCoy was shocked to see Lucas at Salgado's residence because she had not told Lucas that she was there, and she had never told him where Salgado lived.



Through the front window, McCoy observed Lucas and Will Bonilla in front of the house. Bonilla, who was a friend of both Salgado and Lucas, had introduced her to both men and was watching from a Jeep that was parked in the driveway. McCoy told Salgado, who was still in his bedroom, "Look, look what your friend [Bonilla] did," and instructed Salgado to "[j]ust stay here, I'm going to leave." Instead, Salgado went to the front door "to see who was looking for him" and exchanged "a couple words" with Lucas. Shortly thereafter, the two men began fighting. When McCoy went outside, she observed Lucas on top of Salgado. McCoy "grabbed [Lucas] from the back of his shirt" and demanded that he get up and let Salgado go. Fearing that Lucas would get into trouble, she asked him to leave, saying, "Just get off of [Salgado]. It's not worth it. He's not worth it. I'm not worth it. Just get up and go, you don't need any trouble." After Lucas left, McCoy approached Bonilla, slapped him across the face, and demanded, "why would you do that? Why would you bring [Lucas] here?" McCoy then helped Salgado find his eyeglasses, and the two re-entered the house and returned to his bedroom. While outside, Salgado did not strike, yell at, or argue with McCoy.



Inside the bedroom, Salgado yelled at McCoy, "Look what you did. You brought trouble to my house." He then grabbed her hair and head-butted her before pushing her down on the bed. She hit the wall with the right side of her face as Salgado pinned her down and "just [started] swinging wherever he could." Salgado slapped her and head-butted her repeatedly and then began to punch her with his closed fist. She put her left arm up to block his punches and yelled for him to stop. Her forehead was "hurting because of all the head-butts," and the blows to her face were painful. Salgado only stopped beating her when Hernan Zelaya-Otero, Salgado's landlord, entered the bedroom and yelled, "What the hell? What are you doing? Let her go." Salgado stopped hitting her and responded, "Yeah, yeah. We're leaving."



After Zelaya-Otero left the room, Salgado again complained, "See, that's what I'm -- You brought trouble to my house," and began a second round of blows with his fist to her face, her arms, and her legs. When Zelaya-Otero returned to the room a second time and threatened to call the police, Salgado said, "No, no, no, I'm just getting my shoes. We're going to leave." At that point, Zelaya-Otero separated the couple and guided McCoy to his girlfriend, who was waiting in the hallway. The two women went to the bathroom so McCoy could wipe "all the blood" from her face. At no point did McCoy physically strike back at Salgado. She only tried to block his punches with her left arm.



McCoy sat at the dining room table with an ice pack on her face, while Salgado, who by then had her car keys, said that he would take her home. He told her "see, that's what happened to you for being a slut." Salgado took her purse outside and put it in the back seat of his car. He then returned her keys and said she could leave. When McCoy reached her car, she noticed that her purse, which contained her cell phone and her wallet, was in Salgado's car, and she therefore felt that she could not leave. Salgado suggested that she retrieve her purse and when she opened the door he instructed her to get in his car and yelled that she was leaving with him. Afraid, McCoy entered the vehicle, at first sitting in the back seat, but then upon Salgado's insistence, sitting in the front seat. On their way to McCoy's house, Salgado called Bonilla and yelled, "You brought him here. You set me up.... I can't believe you did that. You're supposed to be my friend." Even as Salgado was driving, he repeatedly swung his arm to "hit [McCoy] in the face."



Rather than driving straight to McCoy's house, Salgado pulled over at a 7-Eleven. Salgado demanded that McCoy go inside and buy him beer. Because she was still wiping blood from her nose, however, she said "no," and told him to go buy his own beer. When Salgado entered the 7-Eleven, McCoy took the opportunity to escape. She exited the vehicle, ran to a nearby stranger, and said, "I don't care where you drop me off, just get me out of this parking lot, 'cause if he comes back out, I don't know what's going to happen to me." The stranger dropped McCoy off at her friend's house. Additional friends arrived and took her back to Salgado's house to retrieve her vehicle, where she learned that the glass to her windshield was broken and the two side-view mirrors were damaged. She then went to the hospital where she discovered that she had fractures to her right eye socket and her left wrist. At the time of trial, McCoy still suffered "extensive nerve damage" to the right side of her face.



Zelaya-Otero confirmed that on the night of the offenses Salgado engaged in a fight "with another individual" in the front yard of the house. He stated that McCoy stayed inside the house the entire time and did nothing to encourage or discourage the fight. After the fight ended, Salgado and McCoy immediately began arguing and eventually went to Salgado's bedroom. Zelaya-Otero opened the door to the bedroom twice to instruct them to stop fighting and then finally asked them to leave. About twenty-five minutes after the couple left the house, Zelaya-Otero observed Salgado

outside in front of the house, and he saw Salgado break the windshield and the side mirror on McCoy's car.



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Affirmed