On the afternoon of Friday, April 30, 2021, friends of a thirty-year-old nurse in Curitiba, the capital of the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, persuaded the doorman of his apartment building in the Lindoia neighborhood to help them call a locksmith. They had not heard from David Júnior Alves Levisio since Tuesday night. When the door was opened, they found him dead, face down, with his hands tied. Five days later, about two kilometers away, friends of a twenty-five-year-old medical student named Marcos Vinício Bozzana da Fonseca found his apartment locked and called the police. He had been dead for more than a day, covered to the head with a blanket.
Within a month the Paraná Civil Police had connected those two deaths to a third, of a university professor in Santa Catarina, and to an attack on a fourth man in Curitiba who survived. They named José Tiago Correia Soroka, then thirty-three, as the suspect, published his photograph and asked the public to help find him before the next Tuesday. He was arrested on May 29, 2021, and confessed the same day. Courts in two states later convicted him of robbery resulting in death, a crime Brazilian law calls latrocínio, and sentenced him to a combined total of more than 130 years.
This page follows the Brazilian press, which reported his full name throughout. It relies on news reports in Portuguese, translated here; the court files in Paraná were sealed to protect the victims, so some of what is known about the evidence comes from prosecutors' and police statements rather than the judgments themselves.
Soroka was born in Palmas, a municipality of about 51,000 people in south-central Paraná, on the border with Santa Catarina, according to the Campo Grande News, citing police. Reports in May 2021 gave his age as thirty-three; one Campo Grande News report that week gave thirty-two. Police and the press said he was also known by the nickname "Japa."
Little of his early life is on the record. Delegate Thiago Nóbrega of the Curitiba Homicide and Personal Protection Division (DHPP) told the magazine Piauí, as reported by the Campo Grande News, that one of Soroka's sisters had told police she had a "vague memory" of her brother being sexually abused as a child. "She believes he was traumatized, because he has already been through psychiatric treatment," Nóbrega said.
In an interview with Folha de S.Paulo after his arrest, summarized by NSC Total, Soroka said he had served in the Army and taken a course for security guards, which he gave as the source of his fighting ability. Police told reporters he knew martial arts. He had had two long relationships with women and had two children, aged nine and four in 2021. His record included earlier arrests for drunk driving, passing counterfeit bills and two car robberies, according to the same Folha report.
A man who said he had been in a four-year relationship with Soroka also came forward to police. In June 2023 he gave an interview, without being identified, to the TV Globo program Linha Direta. He said they had met in an online chat, that Soroka came to his home every weekend while also having a girlfriend, and that he had given Soroka almost 100,000 reais over the course of the relationship because Soroka said he had a child and many expenses. In 2019, he said, they argued over money and Soroka put him in a chokehold. "He squeezed my neck hard, my voice wouldn't come out," he said. "He said he wanted money, the credit cards and the bank cards." He said he was punched twice and left tied up for several hours before Soroka untied him and asked him not to call the police. Two years later, he said, he saw Soroka's face on the news. No charge over that incident appears in the sources.
Robson Olivino Paim was thirty-six. He taught geography at the Federal University of the Southern Frontier (UFFS), on its Erechim campus, and was a doctoral student in geography at the Santa Catarina State University (Udesc). He lived in a house in the Santa Luzia neighborhood of Abelardo Luz, a town in western Santa Catarina more than 400 kilometers from Curitiba, according to NSC Total and Jovem Pan. A Folha report summarized by NSC Total said he was in the town visiting family.
His father and an aunt became worried when they heard nothing from him on Friday, April 16, 2021. On Saturday, April 17, they went to the house and found him dead on a bed. Police were called around 8 p.m. He had signs of violence. His Ford EcoSport was missing; it was found in Almirante Tamandaré, in the Curitiba metropolitan region. Reports differ on when: the same night, according to Folha's account, or days later, according to Jovem Pan. The Abelardo Luz Civil Police, under Delegate Marcelo Fernando Tescke, opened an investigation into a possible latrocínio. No security cameras near the house were of use. In a statement, the leadership, staff and students of UFFS said they "deeply regret" his death and offered condolences to his family and friends.
What happened inside the house was described later, in two accounts. According to the prosecution in Santa Catarina, as summarized in the state court's October 2022 appeal ruling, Soroka posted in April 2021 that he would be at the "Beira-Rio," a riverside area. Paim responded, the two exchanged phone numbers and messaged for about a week, and Paim invited him to his home, where he was strangled with the strap of a leather bag. Soroka took the car, notebooks, a camera, a watch and a phone, and drove toward Paraná.
Soroka's own account to Folha was different. He said Paim had approached him while he was running in a park, apparently after seeing his profile on Grindr and recognizing him from a tattoo, and that he told Paim he needed money. He said that when Paim came back from the bathroom undressed and wanted sex, he refused, "and that whole situation happened." Police said Paim was the first of the three deaths.
David Júnior Alves Levisio was a nurse from Londrina, in the north of Paraná. He had moved to Curitiba only about two months before he died and lived alone in a condominium in Lindoia. His age is given as thirty in the first reports and in the July 2022 coverage of the sentence, and as twenty-eight in the Paraná Civil Police figures quoted in May 2021.
His friends told police he had stopped answering messages on the night of Tuesday, April 27, 2021; the last message he viewed was in the early hours of Wednesday, April 28. On Friday, April 30, they went in with the locksmith. According to Delegate Victor Menezes, he was lying face down with his hands tied and a pillow over his face. A military police captain at the scene said it was too early to know whether more than one person was involved, and friends told reporters David had recently been seeing a man. Police later said Soroka went to his home on April 27 after arranging a meeting through an app; security camera footage released by police in May showed a man walking around the building. A lawyer for his family followed the investigation but did not give interviews.
Marcos Vinício Bozzana da Fonseca, twenty-five, was from Campo Grande, the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul. His name appears as both Marco and Marcos in police statements and press reports. According to the Campo Grande News, he finished high school in Campo Grande and spent three years in preparatory courses there before passing five university entrance exams. He moved to Curitiba in 2017 to study medicine at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR) and was in his final year when he died. The PUCPR chapter of the International Federation of Medical Students' Associations wrote that he was a member of class 79 and "was much loved among his classmates and professors." He lived alone in an apartment in the Portão neighborhood.
He died on Tuesday, May 4, 2021. Relatives and friends could not reach him, and on Wednesday, May 5, friends found the apartment locked and called police. His body was found at about 4:30 p.m., covered by a blanket. Delegate Nóbrega said he had no visible injuries and appeared to have been asphyxiated. Police later said Soroka had used a blanket to suffocate him. The building's exterior cameras showed a man leaving late at night with a backpack that looked full and a bag in his hand, and getting into a taxi. Marcos's laptop and phone were gone.
On Tuesday, May 11, 2021, Soroka went to the apartment of another man in Bigorrilho, a middle-class neighborhood of Curitiba. The man, an architect who lived alone and has not been named, fought back and survived, though he lost some belongings. He told Piauí that while his attacker was trying to choke him, the man said, "I am the Joker! I'm crazy, I like to kill." He gave the same account to police, and Nóbrega repeated it publicly during the search. Soroka later denied saying it. He told Folha the architect survived "because he cooperated" and let himself be robbed after a struggle.
Prosecutors and police described the survivor as central to the case. The Paraná Public Prosecutor's Office said in July 2022 that his testimony was fundamental to the investigation, and NSC Total reported that he helped officers locate Soroka.
The first two Curitiba deaths were handled at first as homicides. Investigators reclassified them as latrocínio when they found that belongings had been taken, the Paraná Civil Police said in May. Before police made any link public, LGBTI organizations did. On May 10, 2021, Toni Reis, president of the Aliança Nacional LGBTI+, told Banda B that both Curitiba men had used dating apps and that the group feared one person was responsible. The alliance issued a manual of eleven safety tips, including advice to avoid apps that do not verify users and to meet strangers in a hotel with cameras. Marcel Jeronymo, legal coordinator of Grupo Dignidade, said both men were single, from other cities and living alone, and that he and the lawyer for David's family had sent the delegate reports of a third death in Abelardo Luz that matched the pattern. On May 12, NSC Total reported that the Paraná and Santa Catarina police were exchanging information.
The investigation was run by the DHPP in Curitiba, under its chief, Delegate Camila Cecconello, with Delegate Thiago Nóbrega, with support from the Santa Catarina Civil Police. Nóbrega said the key evidence was facial recognition from images captured by the victims' condominiums. Police also had footage of a man in Almirante Tamandaré after Robson Paim's car was abandoned there.
On Sunday, May 16, the Paraná Civil Police released Soroka's name, photographs and video, and said temporary arrest warrants had been issued for him. "We decided to release it so that he does not make new victims, since we are seeing one victim per week, on the same day of the week," Cecconello said. She described a man with "psychological disturbances" who had been acting the same way for about thirty days. The three Curitiba attacks had fallen on consecutive Tuesdays. Police said the three men who died were gay, lived alone and were found on their beds with signs of asphyxia, and that the attacker had exchanged photos with them before going to their homes and covering them with bedding afterward.
Delegate Claudio Marques, who works with LGBT victims, used the announcement to give advice: meet strangers in a public place first, and if you bring someone home, ask them to take off their pandemic mask in front of the doorman so their face is recorded. "If the person has bad intentions, they will certainly leave," he said.
Soroka moved between boarding houses and used false names, according to police. At one point before his arrest, officers searching a Curitiba suburb approached him; he gave a false name and got away, though a friend who was with him was detained, Folha reported.
On the night of Friday, May 28, 2021, after tips and cross-checking by its intelligence section, the DHPP located Soroka at a boarding house in Capão Raso, on the outskirts of Curitiba, where he had been staying for about five days. Officers watched the building through the night and arrested him at about 7 a.m. on Saturday, May 29. He did not resist.
At the DHPP he was questioned without a lawyer, at his own request, because he said he would confess everything; a psychologist was present. "We questioned him about the three deaths of the young men and the attempt on a fourth, and he confessed to them, giving details of the crimes and what he took from the victims," Cecconello said. He told police he went to the victims' homes, caught them off guard, applied a chokehold and suffocated them with a pillow or blanket. He did not have sex with them, police said.
He told investigators robbery had been his aim, that he made between 4,000 and 6,000 reais selling what he took from each man, and that he had planned to go on with one attack a week to pay for "superfluous things" and cocaine. He said he had chosen gay men because they were "easy targets." Cecconello said some evidence suggested "a component of hatred" as well. Nóbrega went further. "We believe he chose gay men because of some unresolved trauma," he told UOL, as quoted by the Campo Grande News. "In the words of a psychologist who was following the statement, 'he killed outside what was killing him inside.' At no time did he choose women, heterosexual men or the elderly." Nóbrega said Soroka had told them he had other victims but would only discuss those police already knew about.
In a recorded part of the interrogation broadcast by RPC, the Globo affiliate in Paraná, Soroka admitted robbing other men but declined to give details: "There were several situations, but in these cases I reserve the right not to answer." Police estimated, from his statements, that he had robbed between ten and twenty people. He denied killing anyone else.
On Monday, May 31, a Folha de S.Paulo reporter spoke to Soroka for about fifteen minutes in a room at the DHPP, where he sat handcuffed hand and foot. That day he had hired the lawyer of one of his cellmates. "It has nothing to do with sexual orientation, but with how easy it was to get in," he said. "I want to make it very clear that it was not out of hatred or homophobia." He said he would have gone with a woman or a heterosexual man if he had seen a chance of success. He denied being attracted to men or being bisexual, as he had described himself on social media, and called that bait.
He described applying the chokehold as soon as he was inside, then waiting for the men to come to so he could "explain that I only wanted to take something." He said the deaths followed from their reactions: "They tried to react, started hitting me, cursing, said they would call the police, and I ended up squeezing a little more and they didn't come back." Police noted that he had dressed the bodies, covered them and locked the doors from outside, and said they did not rule out a sexual element. He said he did not want to be known as a serial offender. "I think it really was a mistake to have done all this, for me, for my life, and for the families and the lives of the people."
Within days of the arrest, a Curitiba lawyer, Claudio Dalledone, pointed to the death of a physician, Sergio Roberto Savytzky, who was found asphyxiated in his apartment in Bigorrilho on August 12, 2016. Dalledone had represented a patient of the doctor who was held for five months in that case and later cleared. He noted that the doctor's car had been taken to Capão Raso, where Soroka was arrested, and released a comparison of elevator footage he said showed a matching height. Nóbrega said Soroka denied it. "He even said he would have no problem confessing to that crime, since one more would make no difference," the delegate told Banda B. "He says it is not his way of acting, that he would not have sought out the victim, and that he was contacted through the apps." Soroka has not been charged in that death, and none of the sources reports any result from the police inquiry into it.
The Paraná Civil Police concluded its inquiry into Marcos Vinício's death in June 2021 and indicted Soroka for latrocínio, which Brazilian law classes as a "crime hediondo" and punishes with twenty to thirty years. In July 2021 the 5th Prosecutor's Office for Criminal Prevention and Prosecution in Curitiba filed charges in that case, in proceedings under seal. Prosecutors also charged him with homophobia, using the 2019 ruling of the Federal Supreme Court that treats homophobia as a form of racism under Article 20 of Law 7,716/1989, punishable by one to three years. By then, the Campo Grande News reported, he was already facing charges over David Levisio's death and the attempt in Bigorrilho. The Robson Paim case went to the courts of Santa Catarina.
On July 8, 2022, Judge Cristine Lopes of the 12th Criminal Court of Curitiba sentenced Soroka to 104 years, 4 months and 6 days in prison and 229 day-fines, about 9,200 reais. The sentence became public on July 14. He was convicted of two completed latrocínios, of David Levisio and Marcos Vinício, one attempted latrocínio, of the Bigorrilho survivor, aggravated robbery, extortion and homophobia. Because the crimes were separate, the judge added the penalties together. "The penalties must be added, resulting in a total penalty for the accused of 104 (one hundred and four) years, 04 (four) months and 6 (six) days of imprisonment and 229 (two hundred and twenty-nine) day-fines, which I make final," the sentence reads.
The judge also addressed his character. "It is found that the accused, because he presents the characteristics of dissocial personality disorder, disregarded the result of death in the latrocínio offenses, in the sense of not showing any remorse because of the distorted view he has of empathy," she wrote. Prosecutor Rafael Carvalho Polli of the MPPR said the method had been the same each time: "He went to the victims' homes and took advantage of the situation. He killed two people and took their goods."
Soroka remained in preventive detention and was not allowed to appeal in liberty. His defense told NSC Total it would appeal and argue that the deaths should be classified as homicide rather than latrocínio.
In Santa Catarina, Judge William Borges dos Reis convicted Soroka of the latrocínio of Robson Paim and sentenced him to thirty years in a closed regime. The sources do not give the date of that sentence. At the police station Soroka had confessed and said he made more than 5,000 reais from the stolen goods. In court he changed his account and said he did not remember taking anything and had taken the car only to get away.
On appeal he asked the Santa Catarina Court of Justice to reclassify the crime as homicide. The 2nd Criminal Chamber, with Judge Norival Acácio Engel as rapporteur and Judges Hildemar Meneguzzi de Carvalho and Salete Silva Sommariva, rejected that unanimously in Criminal Appeal 5002256-47.2021.8.24.0001, reported on October 1 and 3, 2022. The rapporteur held that the change in his account did not weaken the evidence, and that because the violence used to take the property had caused the death, "there is no question of reclassification to the crime of homicide." The only part of the appeal granted was the setting of fees for his court-appointed lawyer.
The two sentences together come to more than 130 years, a figure TV Globo and the Paraná press used in June 2023. As of the June 2023 reports by Banda B, Bem Paraná and the Diário do Nordeste, the Curitiba conviction was described as a first-instance judgment, and Soroka was held in preventive detention without the right to appeal in liberty. No source found reports the result of an appeal in Paraná, any further appeal in the Santa Catarina case, or where he is held. This page therefore describes him as convicted, with appeal pending, as of June 2023. The sources do not discuss when he could become eligible for release.
On June 1, 2023, TV Globo's revived Linha Direta, presented by Pedro Bial, devoted an episode to the case under the title "O Serial Killer de Curitiba." It included interviews with parents of the victims, with a man who had escaped, and with the psychologist and forensic expert Guilherme Bertassoni da Silva. The former partner's account of the 2019 attack was first made public in that program.
The case also drew attention to the risks of meeting strangers through dating apps. Police and LGBTI groups gave public advice while Soroka was at large. When the program aired, Bem Paraná noted that the Curitiba sentence carried the homophobia conviction, a crime that since the Supreme Court's 2019 ruling cannot be time-barred and is not eligible for bail in Brazil.
Proven in court, subject to the appeals described above: the latrocínios of Robson Olivino Paim, David Júnior Alves Levisio and Marcos Vinício Bozzana da Fonseca; the attempted latrocínio of the Bigorrilho survivor; aggravated robbery; extortion; and homophobia.
Confessed but not separately tried, as far as the sources show: the robbery of between ten and twenty other people, a police estimate based on his statements.
Disputed: his motive. He told police and Folha he wanted only to rob and that gay men were easy targets. Police said they saw hatred and possibly unresolved trauma, and the Curitiba court convicted him of homophobia. He also disputed the survivor's account of the "Joker" remark, and gave a version of Robson Paim's death that differs from the prosecution's.
Unproven: any link to the 2016 death of Sergio Roberto Savytzky, which he denied, and any other deaths. Police said in 2021 that they were still looking for other victims; no further charge is reported. The 2019 assault on his former partner is that man's televised account; no case over it is reported.
2019: According to a former partner interviewed in 2023, Soroka chokes, robs and ties him up after a dispute over money.
April 16, 2021: Robson Olivino Paim, 36, is killed at his home in Abelardo Luz, Santa Catarina; his father and an aunt find him on April 17. His car is later found in Almirante Tamandaré, Paraná.
April 27, 2021 (Tuesday): David Júnior Alves Levisio is killed in his apartment in Lindoia, Curitiba; friends find him on April 30.
May 4, 2021 (Tuesday): Marcos Vinício Bozzana da Fonseca, 25, is killed in Portão, Curitiba; he is found on May 5.
May 10-12, 2021: LGBTI groups publicly link the deaths; police in the two states exchange information.
May 11, 2021 (Tuesday): An architect in Bigorrilho, Curitiba, survives an attack and is robbed.
May 16, 2021: Paraná Civil Police name Soroka and release his photographs; temporary arrest warrants are out.
May 29, 2021: Soroka is arrested at a Capão Raso boarding house and confesses to the three deaths and the attack.
May 31, 2021: He tells Folha de S.Paulo the deaths were not motivated by hatred.
June 2021: Police indict him for latrocínio in the death of Marcos Vinício.
July 2021: The MPPR charges him, including with homophobia.
July 8, 2022: Judge Cristine Lopes, 12th Criminal Court of Curitiba, sentences him to 104 years, 4 months and 6 days; made public July 14.
By October 2022: Judge William Borges dos Reis sentences him to 30 years for the Paim latrocínio; the Santa Catarina Court of Justice upholds it unanimously (reported October 1-3, 2022).
June 1, 2023: Linha Direta airs an episode on the case; reports describe the Curitiba sentence as first instance, with Soroka in preventive detention.