A woman thought she was being helpful when the Serbian man she had met on a dating app asked her to translate a message into Colombian Spanish, saying he needed it for a novel his friend was writing.
“I met someone wonderful,” the message began. “He has a summer house about 2h from Madrid. We are going there now and I will spend a few days there. There is barely any signal though. I’ll call you when I get back.”
The woman sent him back the Spanish version of the message. Later, her mother Googled his name, David Knezevich.
That was when she saw, according to a criminal complaint, that he was the husband of Ana Knezevich, a Fort Lauderdale woman of Colombian descent who disappeared in Madrid in February and hasn’t been seen since. The exact message the woman had sent him for his friend’s novel appeared again and again in news reports, sent from Ana Knezevich’s phone the day she disappeared.
David Knezevich was arrested Saturday at Miami International Airport on federal kidnapping charges pertaining to his involvement in his wife’s disappearance, according to federal officials. It remains unclear if Ana Knezevich is alive or dead, but a federal complaint brings to light new details about the events surrounding her husband and her disappearance. Investigators allege that David Knezevich spray-painted the security cameras at his wife’s building in Madrid, stole license plates from a car on the street where she had disappeared, and later, while she was widely reported missing, had his employees impersonate her in order to close out insurance policies and open a bank account.
On Feb. 2, Ana Knezevich went to look at apartments. She wanted to stay in Madrid more permanently, she told her friends. She was preparing for a divorce from David Knezevich, in which he did not want to divide up the assets evenly, according to the complaint. She was afraid of him and thought he was secretly monitoring her. According to a petition for conservatorship filed by her family in Broward, she had told friends that he was narcissistic and manipulative during group therapy sessions.
Security cameras captured Ana Knezevich entering her Madrid apartment a little after 2 p.m. It would be the last time anyone ever saw her.
That night, a man in a helmet entered the building a little before 9:30 p.m. Inside, he spray-painted the security camera lens, though he did not completely obscure its view. It captured him duct-taping the building’s lock so that he could enter it again. At one point, he looked right at the camera. He appeared to have “physical characteristics that resemble of those of Knezevich,” the complaint states.
About an hour later, camera footage captured him leaving the elevator with what appeared to be a suitcase.
The next day, David Knezevich reached out to the Colombian woman he had met on the dating app, who is not named in the complaint.
“Hey babe,” he wrote. “I need your help.”
He explained that his Serbian friend was writing a novel with a minor character who is Colombian and he needed her help translating. They workshopped the paragraph back and forth, the complaint says.
Later that day, a text message went out from Ana Knezevich’s phone to her friends, identical to the one the woman had translated. Despite the translation, her friends and family were immediately suspicious. It did not sound like her, they said.
Firefighters forced their way into Ana Knezevich’s apartment on Feb. 4. She had disappeared, and so had her cellphone, laptop, and chargers. Using surveillance footage, police identified the brand of spray paint the man had used to disable the camera. They found that a retailer had sold the same brand of spray paint earlier that day to a man who looked like David Knezevich, according to the store’s surveillance footage. He also bought two rolls of duct tape.
Meanwhile, the Colombian woman had continued talking to David Knezevich, who had sent her a picture of a plane ticket from Serbia to Colombia, though he never got on the plane. At some point, the woman told her mother about him. Her mother then Googled his name and came across the news stories about his wife disappearance in Madrid. When the woman read the articles, she found the text and later contacted authorities.
David Knezevich had flown to Istanbul from Miami in late January, then arrived in Serbia. But he didn’t stay there, according to the complaint. On Jan. 30, he left the country in a car. He did not return until Feb. 5, three days after Ana’s disappearance.
When Knezevich returned the car he had rented, the windows were tinted, the license plate frames had changed, and two stickers had been removed, according to the owner of the rental car agency. The car had traveled close to 5,000 miles.
A man in Madrid had submitted a police complaint saying that the license plates were stolen off his car, on the street where Ana Knezevich had been staying, Calle Francisco Sivela. The stolen plates had been captured at toll booths on the same type of car that David Knezevich had rented, though the tinted windows obscured the driver from view, according to the complaint.
About a month later, with Ana Knezevich still missing, a number associated with David Knezevich’s company called an insurance company to cancel three policies. She told the company that she was Ana Knezevich. Children could be heard in the background; Ana Knezevich had no children.
Then, in April, an employee of the company told police that David Knezevich had instructed her to impersonate his wife in order to open a new bank account, according to the complaint He had given her Ana Knezevich’s social security number.
The employee told police that she had told him that she did not feel comfortable impersonating a missing woman. He told her that it was “not serious” and that she had to do it in order to be paid.
“I cannot call with my voice because I sound like a guy,” David Knezevich told her, according to the complaint.
Knezevich appeared in federal court in Miami briefly Monday, and is currently being held in the Federal Detention Center in Miami, inmate records show. A bond hearing is scheduled for Friday, the Associated Press reported.
It is unclear why David Knezevich had chosen to return to South Florida on Monday. His attorney, Ken Padowitz, said Tuesday that he would not speak on the case at this time and is in the process of reviewing the evidence and meeting with his client.
Ana Knezevich’s brother referred reporters to his family’s attorneys for comment. Adam Ingber, the family’s U.S.-based attorney, declined to comment when reached by phone Tuesday but said he is preparing to put out a statement.
___
© 2024 South Florida Sun Sentinel
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
