The detectives then confronted the larger contradiction. Ronaldo was telling them he had spent months unable to distinguish real from fake, yet friends and relatives had described a man who worked, pursued professional certification, communicated with others, and had not been diagnosed with a condition that explained the behavior they were now seeing. He said he had been confused for months but offered little detail about when it started or what caused it. He did acknowledge that friends had at some point thought he might need help.
"Do you feel like this is real right now?" a detective asked. Ronaldo could not give the straightforward answer they wanted. He said he did not know whether the situation around him was real, and investigators tried to establish how long that feeling had existed. The answer remained the same general claim: the last couple of months had been difficult, and he had trouble distinguishing what was real from what was not.
Detectives asked whether anything specific had triggered the change and whether he had told anyone about it. They also asked whether friends had approached him because they thought he needed help. Ronaldo's answers remained fragmented, but he agreed that others had expressed concern. What he would not do was connect those concerns to the events at Suela's apartment.
The investigators returned to the morning itself. They asked whether Ronaldo remembered going to the apartment, picking up Allesia, or seeing where she had been when he arrived. He said he was not sure because he could not tell which parts of what they were saying were real. Detectives emphasized that he did not have to certify a memory as fact; they simply wanted him to describe whatever images were in his mind.
Ronaldo accused them of asking him to lie. The detectives denied that and repeated that a possible memory could still be useful even if he doubted it. Ronaldo replied that they could create their own story from the evidence instead of asking him to do it. That exchange made the distance between the two sides unmistakable: investigators were offering him repeated openings to explain himself, while Ronaldo kept refusing to step through them.
The detectives began appealing directly to his identity as a father. They told him that fear, panic, even a catastrophic mistake could be understood more easily than total indifference. They said the people who knew him did not describe him as habitually violent, and that if something had caused him to snap, this was his chance to explain it. They repeatedly emphasized that an explanation would not erase what happened but could at least give Allesia and Suela's family some understanding.
They returned to the roofing certification because friends had described it as one of the recent disappointments in Ronaldo's life. Ronaldo had already acknowledged that he was disappointed when things did not go as planned, but he rejected the suggestion that the setback explained the morning. Detectives agreed that disappointment by itself did not account for the violence; they were testing whether it belonged to a larger pattern of stress that had changed his behavior over the previous days. Ronaldo would not connect the business problem to Suela or to the confrontation with his parents.
The investigators also emphasized what relatives had told them about Ronaldo before January 29. They had not been given a history of drug abuse, chronic violent behavior, or a known psychiatric diagnosis that neatly explained the scene. That was precisely why they kept returning to the contrast between the man described by people close to him and the evidence now sitting in front of them. If something had changed, detectives wanted him to identify when it changed and what he believed was happening when he went to Suela's home.
Ronaldo's answers sometimes suggested that he understood more than he admitted. He could follow the detectives' logic, dispute assumptions, challenge questions, and object when he thought they were asking him to speculate. Yet when the discussion reached the apartment, Suela, or the reason he left with Allesia, he repeatedly retreated into uncertainty. Detectives began telling him directly that the pattern made it appear as though he was choosing which memories to acknowledge.
They tried another approach by normalizing the possibility of panic. A detective told him that people sometimes make terrible decisions and then struggle to admit what they have done, especially when the consequences are irreversible. If Ronaldo had lost control for a moment, believed he was protecting his daughter, or acted because of some fear he now recognized as irrational, investigators wanted him to say so. The point was not to excuse the act, they said, but to separate a motive from the physical sequence the evidence would eventually establish.
The detectives repeatedly described the difference between a forensic reconstruction and a human explanation. Blood patterns could indicate where violence occurred, and trace evidence could show who had contact with which surfaces or objects. The knife, clothing, and material from the apartment could be examined scientifically. None of those tests could independently tell Suela's family what Ronaldo was thinking before he entered the residence.
That distinction became the heart of the interview. Detectives told Ronaldo that the case could move forward without his cooperation because his daughter had already spoken and because physical evidence connected him to the apartment. What they did not have was a reliable account of the internal sequence: what he believed, what he wanted, whether he was angry, whether he was frightened, or whether the statements about demons reflected something he actually believed. Ronaldo continued to offer no coherent answer.
At several points, the investigators warned him that silence and evasiveness could affect how his demeanor was interpreted. They told him that a person who admitted making a terrible mistake and expressed regret would look very different from someone who responded to every question with another question. Ronaldo did not owe them the emotional response they wanted, but detectives were openly telling him how his behavior appeared from their side of the table. He still did not provide the apology or explanation they were seeking.
The child remained the strongest pressure point. Whenever detectives discussed Allesia, Ronaldo showed more engagement than when they discussed Suela, but even then he avoided describing the apartment. Investigators believed that if anything could break through his detachment, it would be hearing how terrified his daughter had been and how clearly she remembered the morning. That strategy would dominate the final phase of the interrogation.
One detective laid out the known sequence in increasingly direct terms. Ronaldo had gone to Suela's apartment while she and Allesia were there. A violent confrontation had occurred inside. He later returned to the residence where his parents were staying and became involved in a separate altercation with his father. His parents then called police because of statements Ronaldo had made about needing to save his daughter, who had been with Suela.
The detective told Ronaldo that forensic specialists would eventually reconstruct the physical sequence through blood patterns, location evidence, fingerprints, footprints, and other trace evidence. Those findings could show where people moved and how the attack unfolded. What forensics could not necessarily answer was the question detectives kept putting in front of him: why. That answer, they said, might exist only in Ronaldo's mind.