“She had such a bright future; she was captain of the soccer team; everyone liked her.”

Four years after the abduction, rape and murder of South Miami High student Ana Maria Angel, her mother, Margarita Osorio, and Angel’s boyfriend, Nelson Portobanco (who survived the kidnapping), are still tormented by the harrowing event.

Coping with the loss of a loved one is hard enough and only time can heal such trauma. But then, there’s the legal system.

The five alleged assailants are currently in jail — charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, armed robbery and armed sexual battery — and are awaiting trial. All of them face the death penalty if convicted. But it could take a while for anything to happen.

“Death penalty cases take a long time to get through the system,” states Ed Griffith, spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. “At present the activity revolves around defense motions …. Unfortunately, there is not even a soft trial date on the horizon for these death penalty cases. That is the nature of a five-defendant death penalty case [and] no defendant is in any rush to take their case to trial. Sadly, this places a tremendous emotional burden on the victim’s family, in this case the poor girl’s mother.”

Meanwhile Osorio and Portobanco have filed a lawsuit against the city as well as Penrod Brothers, Inc., which owns the Nikki Beach and Pearl restaurants/nightclubs at 1 Ocean Drive, the properties near where the abduction occurred. Recently, the suit against the city was dropped.

“The city proved that it had done nothing wrong and that the plaintiff’s allegations were without merit, including that we didn’t not provide reasonable security in the area,” says Judith Weinstein, the first assistant city attorney who handled the case. “Someone cannot sue the city because they think you don’t have enough police officers around. It’s a horrible, horrible incident, but the city didn’t do anything wrong.”

Yet the Penrod case is still ongoing, with the plaintiffs also claiming that the venue failed to provide reasonable security. They are suing for damages for pain and suffering and mental anguish, said Osorio and Portobanco’s lawyer.

On April 27, 2002, Ana Maria Angel and Nelson Portobanco, two 18-year-old high school sweethearts, were celebrating their five-month anniversary over churrasco steaks at Los Ranchos in Bayside. They ended the night with a moonlit promenade on the sand at the southernmost tip of South Beach. Then, as they were walking back at approximately midnight, their alleged attackers, (then between the ages of 16 and 34), jumped them at gunpoint and forced them into a rented four-door F-150 pickup truck.

Joel Lebron, Cesar Antonio Mena, Hector Caraballo, Victor Antonio Caraballo and Jesus Torres Roman had driven down from Orlando, with the intent to commit a robbery by staking out a spot in some bushes near the Penrod property in South Pointe, according to Miami Beach police.

Continued