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The Shooting of Estefano

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Estefano wrote 10 of the 12 tracks on Como Ama una Mujer (How a Woman Loves), which was released in early 2007. One tune affected Lopez so much that she wept as she sang and had to take a break in the studio. Another song, "Por Arriesgarnos" ("To Risk Ourselves"), included a Lopez and Anthony duet.

But mainstream critics who normally loved Lopez's pop sound universally panned the album. "Torpor, it turns out, really is the universal language," sniffed Entertainment Weekly, which gave the disc a C+.

It got worse. During the first few months of 2007, Estefano was having financial troubles at the Biscayne Boulevard studio, Beltran would later testify. By the end of each month, there was hardly enough money to make payroll or pay bills. "We were always struggling with money," she explained.

It seemed the problems might end when Estefano planned to receive two payments totaling $3.3 million from a songwriting contract with Sony. The money was supposed to be sent to accounts controlled by Gil and then forwarded to Estefano.

But very little of it arrived, so Estefano telephoned Gil to inquire. He was "met with delays, excuses, lectures, and a lot of resistance," says the songwriter's lawyer, Jay Thornton. This call, according to court records, might have been the fuse that lit the powder keg of Estefano's shooting.

Though Gil eventually released a few hundred thousand dollars, that money didn't last long. Estefano went to Colombia for a couple of weeks in May and then took a cruise with a girlfriend named Natalia. He returned to Miami during the week of May 20 and immediately began writing. An insomniac, Estefano enjoyed working at night. Which is why, on May 25, when he left the studio at 9 p.m. to meet up with his handyman Junior, he had every intention of returning to the studio before dawn.

As Estefano lay on the kitchen floor in a pool of his own blood, he faded in and out of consciousness. "When he shoots me, I feel the burn in my head, I feel the explosion in my head," Estefano would later recall. "I lose consciousness and that's it."

He knew he had to get to his cell phone, and to do that he had to crawl across the house. Smearing blood on the walls and floor, he circled the kitchen and living room. "I was like a monster," Estefano later testified.

He found the phone on a counter, but instead of dialing 911, he called Beltran. "I screamed at her," Estefano recalled. "I said, 'Odisa, Junior shot me!'"

Then he blacked out.

Estefano couldn't explain why he phoned the office manager instead of paramedics. Perhaps it was because he knew that her husband, Rene Ruiz, was a doctor. The couple arrived about 40 minutes later — they live in the western part of the county. They were horrified upon entering the bayside mansion. Beltran immediately called 911, and her husband tried to stanch Estefano's bleeding with compresses.

Soon Junior's fate was sealed. At the house, as paramedics wheeled the wounded songwriter into an ambulance, Beltran told police that Estefano had named the handyman. Officers headed to the studio, where a videotape showed Junior dropping off a truck and picking up the motorcycle. Finally, from his hospital bed, Estefano told cops that Junior was his attacker.

Around 2 a.m., detectives drove to the handyman's apartment building on NE 13th Avenue at Second Street. They took him to the police station just a mile away and charged him with attempted murder, a second-degree felony with a maximum sentence of life in prison.

In the days that followed, Estefano accepted only a few visitors: Beltran, the Santería padrino, Andres Suarez, and Suarez's son, Andres Jr.

Strangely, though Gil had flown to Miami from Spain after hearing about the shooting, he never visited the hospital.

The Ochosi Yoruba Church is headquartered in a large salmon-colored home on SW 129th Avenue at 38th Street in West Kendall. Surrounded by a six-foot-tall white metal fence, it's difficult to discern that it's a house of worship. Like the other homes on the street, there's a lush green lawn and well-manicured tropical foliage surrounding the house. A black Hummer and silver Porsche SUV are parked in the circular driveway.

The only details that distinguish it from the other Mediterranean-style homes in the neighborhood are a deer head above the front door, a white statue of a saint on the grass, and the word Ochosi printed in black letters on the front of the building.

Around 2000, Gil and his former musical partner, Donato, introduced Estefano to the place, according to court documents. And it was there that Estefano became a Santería priest. He became so devoted that he donated a black Hummer to Suarez. And he invited the padrino to an awards ceremony in Las Vegas in 2007.

Junior also attended the Ochosi church, the songwriter's attorneys assert. (Though defense lawyer H. Frank Rubio says his client "had no connection to the church.")

Gil had paved Junior's way into the United States by urging Estefano to petition for a work visa for him and then hire him to work as a handyman at the studio. At first, he and Estefano got along well. Junior loved to tell the songwriter about martial arts, motorcycles, and cars. Gil paid the muscular young man for keeping everything in working order and running errands. "He was a great worker," Estefano said.

Indeed Junior had no criminal record in Florida until he was charged with trying to kill the songwriter.

On June 13, 2007 — about three weeks after the shooting — cops interviewed Estefano. He'd become understandably obsessed with his safety. He was apparently staying in a rented condo — and at the same time had contracted a security firm at a cost of $30,000 to patrol his San Marco Island home. He could barely hear because one of the bullets had grazed his right eardrum. And his face and head were bruised and scarred from the bullet wound.

The detectives nevertheless pressed for clues: Had there been any business disputes or contract issues? Beefs with other artists?

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