A judge in Miami on Thursday gave Mexican actor Pablo Lyle more time to prepare his defense in the murder trial that he will be charged with fatally beating an elderly man after a vehicle dispute.
Judge Marlene Fernández-Karavetsos granted the request of Lyle’s attorney, Bruce Lehr, and provisionally delayed the start of the trial from March 15 to June 7.
There will be a hearing on May 27 to verify the status of the case and confirm whether the parties are ready.
This is not the first time the trial date has been changed. It was initially scheduled for February, but also at Lyle’s request, the judiciary agreed to postpone it.
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This time, the postponement occurred during a brief hearing of less than five minutes conducted by Zoom, which also involved Lyle’s other attorney, Philip Reizenstein, and district attorney Eileen Keeley.
Lyle, who lives with his sister in Miami, claims he is innocent. The actor of the Mexican soap “My adorable curse” and the Netflix series “Yankee” wears a GPS monitor around his ankle that allows the authorities to know his movements 24 hours a day.
At the beginning of the hearing, Lehr told the magistrate that he needed more time for the trial.
“We’re still preparing,” said Lyle’s attorney, asking for another 45 to 60 days.
After reviewing her schedule, the Florida 11th Circuit Judge suggested a date for May and June and asked the defense if there were enough days to prepare.
“Could be,” Lehr replied.
Lyle’s lawsuit has been running for nearly two years, since April 2019, and the actor is not licensed to work in the United States.
The confrontation took place in late March 2019, when Lyle’s brother-in-law took the actor, his wife and two children to the Miami airport and they came across the car of Juan Ricardo Hernández, a 63-year-old Cuban.
According to video footage from security, Hernández got out of his car at a red light and approached the window of Lyle’s vehicle to claim his path was blocked. The actor’s brother-in-law got out of the car and argued with Hernández, but when he saw his car driving, he turned back.
Then Lyle, who was sitting in the passenger seat, got out of the vehicle, ran to Hernandez and punched him in the face, according to those footage.
The Cuban gentleman remained on the ground, only when Lyle and his family’s vehicle pulled away. A few hours later, the actor was arrested at the Miami airport while preparing to travel to Mexico.
Hernández died in hospital of a brain injury caused by the trauma, four days after the confrontation.
Lyle has stated that he was acting in self-defense because he feared the Cuban would attack him with a weapon, but those arguments were rejected by a previous judge and by a higher court, which returned the case to the Miami court for trial.