Ronaldo's response continued to frustrate them. He did not offer a clear expression of remorse and did not describe a moment when anger, fear, confusion, or some particular conflict turned into violence. The detectives told him that his half-answers were beginning to look cold and calculated. They wanted to give him the chance to say that he had made a terrible mistake, that he wished he could take it back, or that something had happened internally that he could not control.
Instead, he continued answering questions with questions. One detective told him bluntly that the evidence was not going to disappear simply because he refused to describe it. Suela's blood was on him, the knife had been recovered, and his daughter had been inside the apartment. DNA, fingerprints, and scene reconstruction would eventually stand on their own whether Ronaldo explained himself or not.
At that point, investigators stopped treating the conversation as though they still needed an admission. They already had a homicide scene, physical evidence, witness statements, Ronaldo's possession of Allesia after leaving the apartment, and the account of the child who had been there. The interrogation became a final opportunity for him to tell them why the morning had happened the way it did. He still would not do it.
Then the focus shifted almost entirely to Allesia. A detective asked Ronaldo whether he felt bad that his daughter had watched what happened. Ronaldo answered conditionally: if it had happened, he would feel bad. The detective immediately rejected the phrasing.
"It happened," he told Ronaldo. "I'm not asking you if it happened." The investigators made clear that this was no longer a hypothetical conversation. Suela was dead, Allesia had been present, and the child had already described what she experienced.
Ronaldo finally asked how his daughter was doing. A detective told him that Allesia was safe but deeply frightened. The child had been so terrified during the morning that she had lost control of her bladder, something she had been embarrassed to admit afterward. She had also been rushed out of the apartment with Ronaldo telling her they needed to go.
The detectives stressed another fact they believed Ronaldo needed to hear: Allesia still loved him because he was her father. That did not mean she understood what had happened. They said she had been left with the memory of seeing her mother attacked and then being taken away from the apartment by the same parent she had just watched. The emotional burden of that moment, they warned him, would not disappear when the interview ended.
They also asked about the knife found outside Suela's residence, describing it as a knife with a brass-knuckle-style handle. Ronaldo said he did not recall carrying weapons. When detectives asked whether the weapon might have come from his father's home, Ronaldo replied that his father had many weapons but would not say that he remembered taking that particular knife.
The question about the weapon led detectives back to the two broad explanations they could see. Either Ronaldo had become angry with Suela and intentionally attacked her, or he had genuinely come to believe something irrational about Suela being possessed and his daughter needing to be saved. The detectives told him they could investigate both possibilities, but he was refusing to tell them which, if either, reflected his state of mind.
Ronaldo turned the problem back on them. He suggested that perhaps the detectives could tell him what had happened. They rejected that completely. They could reconstruct events from evidence, they said, but Ronaldo was the only person who could explain the private thoughts or motive that preceded them.
The detectives became increasingly direct about the effect on Allesia. They told Ronaldo that she knew her mother was dead and had described the events to a stranger because she had no other choice. One investigator, who said he had been doing the job for seventeen years, told Ronaldo that hearing Allesia's account had made him emotional. He could not understand why the child's own father was sitting across from them without showing a comparable reaction.
They watched Ronaldo closely as they repeated that Suela was dead. He responded as though he was still processing the words, at times suggesting that he was only accepting what detectives were telling him. That prompted one of the clearest statements of the interrogation.
"This is reality," the detective said. "She is dead." He told Ronaldo that the room, the handcuffs, the evidence, and the criminal charge were all real. Whatever language Ronaldo wanted to use about delusions or dreams, he could no longer pretend the consequences were uncertain.
The investigators also told him that Allesia had described watching her father attack her mother and making sure she was no longer moving before leaving. They were not asking Ronaldo to agree with the child's wording; they were telling him what the child had reported. Their goal at that stage was to see whether hearing his daughter's experience would finally produce remorse, an apology, or even a spontaneous correction of some detail.
It did not. Ronaldo remained detached and difficult to read. When pressed about whether he wanted to apologize to Allesia, he gave no clear statement that satisfied the detectives. They told him that his silence was beginning to communicate something of its own, whether that was fair to him or not.