Nearly a decade after Yuliana Samboní's murder, her father raises troubling questions about the crime

Nearly ten years have passed since Yuliana Samboní was taken from outside her home in Bogotá's Bosque Calderón neighborhood on December 4, 2016. The seven-year-old indigenous girl was kidnapped, abused, and murdered by Rafael Uribe Noguera, an architect from one of the city's prominent families. The case shook Colombia—not only for the brutality of what happened, but for the stark contrast it laid bare between victim and perpetrator, between a child from a poor indigenous family and a man from wealth and standing.

Now, speaking on the podcast Más allá del silencio, Yuliana's father Juvencio Samboní has returned to a detail that has haunted him for nearly a decade. He recalls that his daughter was intercepted outside their home after Uribe Noguera asked her for directions. She came down from the second floor to answer him. Within seconds, she was lifted into his truck—a vehicle that did not even belong to him. The whole thing took two or three minutes while Juvencio and his wife were inside the house.

What troubles Samboní most is a question that logic keeps returning to: How could one man have done this alone? How could Uribe Noguera drive the truck, physically restrain a seven-year-old girl, and keep her from screaming—all at once, all in those few minutes? Yuliana was a child who cried loudly. Her parents heard nothing. No screams, no struggle, no sound at all. "I don't know how he did it," Samboní said during the podcast. "If he was alone or if someone else helped him. I don't know how he could drive and hold her down with the strength that would take." He has never been able to reconcile the mechanics of what happened with what he knows of his daughter's voice, her resistance, the simple physics of one person managing all of it. "Only God knows, and he knows," Samboní said of the man convicted of the crime.

The investigation itself was marked by irregularities—allegations of evidence tampering, contradictory accounts in the early hours. But for Samboní, the unanswered questions about those first minutes remain the most corrosive.

Meanwhile, the family that lost everything has received almost nothing. Samboní now lives in Cauca with his wife and remaining children, working day labor when work is available. He earns thirty thousand pesos a day, or forty if he brings his own food. There is no steady employment, no stable income. "You have to get by however you can," he said, describing the precarity that has defined the years since his daughter's death. The family fled Bogotá after the murder—partly from grief, partly from fear, partly to protect their other children. They never received direct compensation from Uribe Noguera or his family. The financial settlement that came from the conviction went to the Colombian state, not to the people who lost their daughter.

Yuliana would be sixteen now. Samboní thinks about the life that was taken. She wanted to study nursing. She was interested in modeling. She had many expectations, many dreams. He carries the weight of what she might have become, alongside the weight of questions that may never be answered. A decade later, he is still trying to understand how it happened, still waiting for the full truth, still living in the aftermath of a crime that the country has largely moved past.