Omar Santos Loera went into the Reclusorio Oriente in Mexico City in 2011 on a robbery charge and was convicted of a double homicide in Iztapalapa, for which he received one hundred and twenty-two years. He gave the authorities a false name, Erick Hernandez Camacho, and that is the name the sentence was recorded against. One of the two people he killed was killed with a sabre, which is where the press nickname came from. His brother Ricardo was also named in those offences; a warrant was issued for him and never executed.
On October 6, 2011 he escaped. With help from two civilians he dyed his prison uniform, forged documents and official seals, and passed six security checkpoints while a friend created a disturbance in the cells. He remained free for nine years.
By 2020 he was living in the Colonia Metropolitana Primera Seccion in Nezahualcoyotl with Elideth Rios Cabrera, who was thirty and had a ten-year-old son. She worked, supported her parents and paid his way. A week before she died she told him to leave, and telephoned her father to say he had agreed to go.
In the early hours of Monday June 22, 2020 he drugged and strangled her. Her son later told his grandfather that there had been no argument, only his father insisting that his mother drink something he had prepared. Then Santos Loera telephoned Gerardo Rios, her father, and told him he had killed her. Rios drove to the apartment; the State of Mexico police he had called on the way were already there, and his daughter was dead with signs of strangulation.
The warrant took three months. Rios was told there were not sufficient grounds, and when the order finally issued it named Erick Hernandez Camacho, the false identity, not Omar Santos Loera. Authorities said the man under that name was wanted across Mexico and in the United States, but for the earlier offences rather than for the killing of Elideth. Her family said publicly that this left an obvious escape route: he could be caught and then argue he was not the man the warrant named. Rios spent more than a year pressing the case and believed for most of it that nothing was being done.
He was recaptured in October 2021 and taken to the offices of the State of Mexico prosecution service, where Rios was brought to identify him. He denied at first that he was Omar Santos Loera and then accepted it. A day later he was dead, hanged in custody. The prosecution service opened a file under the heading of suicide. When the report was filed, nobody had come to the morgue for the body.
Two deaths are covered by a conviction and one is not, because the only person who could have been tried for it killed himself the day after he was finally caught. Reporting varies on his surname, given once as Sanchez rather than Santos, and on his age, given as twenty-nine and as thirty in 2020.