Esteban Díaz Martínez shows the Medal of Merit that he recently received from Unijepol. /
Esteban Díaz has received the award for Merit in less than a month and has made two podiums in the regional and national judo championships
He has entered homes “jumping out the windows” and says that some think he is “like a shower” when he gets into the patrol car, but it is that way of living his profession that has earned the municipal agent of Siero Esteban Díaz Martínez the Medal of Merit awarded by the National Union of Local Police Chiefs and Officers (Unijepol). His intervention in La Pola, when he managed to prevent a person from jumping from a fourth floor, did not go unnoticed by his superior, the then chief commissioner José Manuel Fernández, who proposed his candidacy.
Thus, the Mierense received the badge last December at the Reconquista hotel in Oviedo. The act, which had been delayed by the pandemic, finally fell on the same day as his birthday and he dedicated the medal to his father. “He was the one who taught me the values of hard work and humility,” he celebrated.
The intervention that has led to this award took place in August 2020 around eight in the afternoon, on Falo Moro street. Several witnesses saw a 56-year-old woman sticking half her body out of a window with the intention of rushing. “It was a second or third floor.” Díaz remembers how he went up to the portal and found the door closed. “We had to insist with a card, when we managed to get in we met a person in the corridor,” he says, still surprised that he had not noticed the ruckus on the landing. Without thinking twice, the agent advanced through the house to enter the room of the neighbor polesa just at the moment in which he made “feint to jump”. I grab her. He had just avoided a suicide attempt, something that “is priceless.” “The only thing I heard was applause, it was very early and there were many scared people,” he says about that day.
I wasn’t alone. His partner Roberto Lastra was with him. The recent reorganization within the Sierense Local Police has separated them after more than a year sharing shifts, something that Díaz regrets, just as he considers it a “regression” of management in the body.
The body, low
“36 years ago we were 3 agents and we are still more or less the same, we are short of people, in the last 3 years 15 people have left and in two years another 7 will leave,” he recounts. For the police, this problem goes further, since he confesses that “sometimes you have to close dependencies” because “there is nobody”, so emergency calls are subject to the time it takes for the municipal police to arrive.
Recognition has practically come over the hood. Díaz entered the Sierense Local Police on May 16, 1986 and on exactly the same day he will put on his uniform for the last time. His years of service, he concedes, will have been “good for some, bad for others”, but he retires “happy” with his work, although “it makes him sad to leave.”
In between and with three decades of experience he remembers hard days. Specifically, an accident in Marcenao comes to mind, where a truck hit a car at a crossroads. A family was traveling in the vehicle, which caught fire. “That marks, it was quite strong,” he says.
He also recalls with “particular drama” the case of the security guard at the Azabache shopping center, César Menéndez, who shot dead a young man who had allegedly stolen two bottles of cologne.
“Everything that the security forces do, we do, in addition to accidents, fights and things of public order, we are not bailiffs or second-rate cops,” he asserts about the comments of the councilor, Ángel García, in which he threatened to dismantle the municipal body, which “has been at the foot of the canyon since the beginning of the pandemic.”
judo champion
The one awarded by Unijepol has not been the only award that has brightened up the days of the agent lately. That is Diaz’s third recognition in less than a month. On November 20, he won the Asturias judo championship together with his partner Mario Corujo -his “de facto partner” in sport after a quarter of a century training together. It is his tenth regional medal, nine of them have been consecutive. Shortly after, in the national competition, they took silver. The second after several bronzes in previous years.
Judo is his escape route and from May on he will dedicate most of his time, in addition to enjoying his family. “I want to continue with it and get my sixth dan,” he enthuses. “If there is luck” he will also participate in the European championship, although there are no dates yet, the only thing he knows is that “it could be in Krakow”. It would not be their first European competition, in 2019 Corujo and Díaz were sixth in the Canary Islands. He arrived from that event at six in the morning, it was the day of Carmín de la Pola and he had to work in the afternoon. Combining his facets as a police officer and a professional athlete is complicated. Retirement, albeit painfully, will make things easier for the agent.
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