Pablo Lyle during pre-trial motions at Miami-Dade Criminal Court in Miami. (Associated Press)
MIAMI — The actor who starred in the Netflix series “Yankee” was convicted Tuesday of fatally punching a man during a road rage confrontation in Miami.
Pablo Lyle, 35, was found guilty of manslaughter by a six-person jury in Miami-Dade circuit court. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
“Two lives were destroyed by simple roadway anger, a situation we see far too often on our streets and on streets across the country,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a statement.
Lyle had been a passenger in an SUV driven by his brother, Lucas Delfino, on March 31, 2019. Delfino had made a wrong turn on the way to the airport and cut off another car when he tried to make a U-turn. The other car’s driver, 63-year-old Juan Ricardo Hernandez, caught up to them at a red light, got out of his car and pounded on the door of the SUV.
In the confrontation caught on surveillance video, Delfino and Lyle both got out of the SUV. Delfino returned to his vehicle when it started rolling into the intersection, but Lyle followed Hernandez, who was walking away, and punched him. Hernandez fell and hit his head on the pavement; he died four days later in a hospital.
Lyle and his family drove off, and he was later detained at Miami International Airport.
Lyle had argued that he was acting in defense of himself and his wife and two children, who were in the SUV. His bid to get the case dismissed under Florida’s “stand your ground” law was rejected.
Before his arrest, Lyle starred in several Televisa telenovelas and had the lead role in the 25-episode Netflix crime show “Yankee,” which began airing in June 2019. He rose to fame in 2014 as the star of the telenovela “La Sombra del Pasado.”
He immigrated from Cuba to Florida in 2011, and had been living in Mexico at the time of the attack.
Originally published at The Associated Press