A Mexican lawyer who was accused of murdering his 21-year-old singer wife has died in a Mexico City prison.
Jesús Hernández Alcocer, 79, had complained to prison guards that he was not feeling well before he suffered a heart attack Tuesday morning, October 4.
The high-profile attorney was rushed to a clinic inside the prison facility and went into cardiac arrest while doctors treated him. He was declared dead at 10:45 a.m. local time.
The Mexico City Attorney General’s Office said it is investigating the cause of death.
The high-profile attorney allegedly shot music singer Yrma Lydya on June 23 before he tried running away with his security guard, but was apprehended by police.
Hernández Alcocer opened up about the troubled relationship in a rare jailhouse interview with Mexican news outlet Milenio that was published September 12.
He claimed that Lydya was not the woman he had been married to.
‘I know that talking about a dead person is wrong, they should be remembered for all the good they did, but I don’t know who I married,’ Hernández Alcocer said.
‘I don’t know if I was married, I don’t know if that was her name and who she was. I have met a person who did not exist, in my experience I do not know who she is and, if I speak of the dead, it is trying to find out who she was.’
Lydya had approached a well-known Mexico City law firm in April about beginning the divorce proceedings following a purported string of domestic violence incidents and provided photos as further proof of her claims, according to Mexican newspaper Excelsior.
The singer had also filed a police report after Hernández Alcocer allegedly beat her in December 2021. He had also threatened her with a gun on another occasion.
Despite the violent episodes, Lydya decided to give her marriage a second chance.
Hernández Alcocer said was introduced to Lydya by Jesús Carlos Quiñones, the founder of Grupo Radio 13, who cared for her as if she was his own daughter, and that he married her after divorcing his wife of 25 years.
‘She had never had anyone in her love life,’ Hernández Alcocer said. ‘But that she was a virgin, that (nobody) had never kissed her. I married her without ever kissing her, for me she was a great girl.’
Hernández Alcocer also rejected Lydya’s accusations that he had beaten her in the past, telling the outlet that his wife was the one who physically abused him and that he did not have the capability of beating her because he had lost the majority of physical strength after undergoing spinal surgery.
‘What man being a man hits a woman? She hit me,’ he said. ‘I have no strength in my hands, neither in my arms nor in my legs since they operated on my spine.’
The couple were inside a private dining room at Suntory, a Japanese cuisine restaurant located in the Mexico City neighborhood of Del Valle, when the lawyer shot his wife.
Hernández Alcocer fired two shots that struck the young woman in the chest and another in the face.
Hernández Alcocer and his driver, Benjamin Hernández Mendoza, 46, were arrested while trying to flee the restaurant in the lawyer’s vehicle. Hernández Mendoza, according to investigators, handed Hernández Alcocer the gun that was used in the murder.
Lydya has been scheduled to perform at a Glendale, California, concert the day before she was shot dead.
