The family of Pittsburgh Pirates star Oneil Cruz has been accused of having a fixer to cover up a 2020 car crash that killed three people. Cruz reportedly escaped prosecution when he rear-ended a motorcycle in the Dominican Republic at the age of 21, killing all three passengers.
According to ProPublica, after one of the victim’s funeral was over, someone showed up with a phone with Oneil Cruz’s mother on the line offering condolences, and wanting to negotiate.
At age sixteen, Oneil Cruz had already signed a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was later traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
“In a court filing the following day, prosecutors said that they had opened an investigation ‘en contra del imputado,’ ‘against the accused.’ They sought ‘coercive measures,’ a mechanism in Dominican law by which a suspect can be forced to remain in custody while an investigation continues. In a press release, they alleged that Cruz ‘had consumed alcoholic beverages prior to the accident.’
“The scandal made headlines in the Dominican Republic and the United States, and then, in a matter of days, it evaporated from the public eye.”
All of the victims’ families had withdrawn their complaints against Oneil Cruz.
Why did the victims’ families withdraw their complaints against Oneil Cruz?
ProPublica reports that, on a trainer’s recommendation, Cruz’s family contacted Dominican billionaire Santo Caraballo to be a fixer while the young baseball star was still in jail. Caraballo, who had political ties, reportedly assisted in convincing the relatives of each victim to take a monetary payment in return for dropping any lawsuits against Cruz.
One of Oneil Cruz’s lawyers requested a postponement of the case during his first court appearance so that they could “in a humane way, seek solutions” for the families and their “material hardships.” The court granted a two-day postponement. Family members of the victims told ProPublica that Caraballo or his associates had already started contacting them.
ProPublica interviewed more than thirty people in the Dominican Republic to learn how Caraballo made the case against Cruz disappear. They also obtained hundreds of pages of previously unreported documents, including voice notes, bank receipts, and court records. They sent Caraballo a summary of their findings and made multiple attempts to contact him about his role, but he never replied.
In those interviews, each family said that because of financial pressure or just practicality, they ended up accepting about $66,000 in payments.
In their press release after the crash, prosecutors had referred to evidence that Cruz had been drinking before the accident. But they never made that claim in court. I reached out to the lead prosecutor as well as the prosecutor’s office to ask why they had decided not to charge Cruz with driving while intoxicated. Both declined to comment. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalist asked the same question the week of the court date. He reported that a spokesperson for the prosecutors explained that Cruz had “smelled of alcohol” after the accident but that police hadn’t performed a sobriety test because of a “procedural error.”
Neither the Pirates, nor Oneil Cruz had much, if anything, to say about the matter
When ProPublica reached out to the Pittsburgh Pirates about Oneil Cruz and the fatal car crash, the team said it had “addressed this matter more than six years ago based on the information available and the outcome of the legal proceedings.”
Cruz declined an interview request. His lawyer called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.”
A couple of weeks after being released on a $34,000 bond, Cruz posted a photo of himself with Caraballo on a golf cart at the Miami airport. In March 2021, Cruz was at the Pirates’ spring training facility in Florida. In August 2021, Cruz appeared in court virtually. The judge dismissed the case and returned his $34,000 bond. A little over a month later, Cruz made his Major League Baseball debut.