The Concepción Court of Appeals unanimously upheld this Tuesday, October 13, the ruling ordering the State to pay $300 million in compensation for emotional distress to the parents and sisters of Sergio Mardoff Peirano. The student disappeared in March 2005, and his remains spent more than three years unidentified at the Legal Medical Service (SML).
According to T13, the amount is divided into $100 million for each parent and $50 million for each sister. The Fourth Chamber, comprising Justices Carola Rivas, María Alejandra Ceroni and Rodrigo Cortés, thus upheld the ruling of the Second Civil Court of Concepción.
Mardoff, a visual arts student at the University of Concepción, was 25 when he went missing on March 30, 2005, in the El Recodo area of San Pedro de la Paz, according to La Tercera. His remains were found on April 6, 2015, at kilometer 37 of the road to Santa Juana, on the banks of the Biobío River. T13 reported that the site is very close to where Jorge Matute Johns was found.
His family did not learn of the discovery until 2018, when an anonymous caller alerted them that there were remains in the Concepción morgue. His parents recognized the clothing, and tests confirmed his identity. On October 4, 2018, the defendant institutions acknowledged that the remains were those of Sergio Mardoff.
The ruling establishes that, after the discovery in 2015, the Prosecutor’s Office issued no orders and summoned no witnesses. It merely sent the remains and some of the items to the SML. After the forensic medical report of September 9, 2015, it provisionally closed the investigation. From then on, according to the ruling, its efforts focused solely on burying the remains and registering them as unidentified.
The court also recalled that on August 11, 2005, the SML took DNA samples from the parents to compare against any remains found. That comparison was not carried out in 2015. The court described the Prosecutor’s Office’s conduct as arbitrary and "absolutely lacking in justification".
Justice Carola Rivas explained that the court considered the harm caused by the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s omissions and the SML’s "failure of service" to have been proven. That legal concept refers to a state agency functioning poorly, late or not at all, for which it must be held liable. The court also rejected the State’s statute-of-limitations defense, meaning its argument that the deadline for filing a lawsuit had passed.
His father, Sergio Mardoff Silva, thanked the media for the ruling. He said his son had been "two days or three days" away from being taken to a mass grave, after which he would never have known anything more about him. He criticized the fact that taxpayers will pay the cost, rather than those who made the mistakes.
Mardoff Silva said that three years after the discovery, a return to the site led to the discovery of his son’s bag, containing his university documents. He stated that the cause of death is undetermined and rejected the suicide hypothesis put forward by the Regional Prosecutor’s Office. The family maintains that third parties may have been involved.
He also referred to former Regional Prosecutor Marcela Cartagena, who led the case and was removed in November 2023 from the investigation into the death of Tomás Bravo. He said he was glad her term had ended and described her as "inhumane" toward his family. He praised the current Regional Prosecutor, Roberto Garrido.
Justice Rivas clarified that appeals are still pending, so the judgment is not yet final. The court rejected the defendant’s appeal seeking to overturn the judgment on procedural grounds, without awarding costs.
