The estranged husband of a missing Fort Lauderdale woman entered a not guilty plea Monday before a Miami federal magistrate who ordered him to remain incarcerated on a felony kidnapping charge.
David Knezevich, 36, was arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Jonathan Goodman in a downtown federal courtroom in a hearing that lasted three minutes, according to court records. Knezevich is seeking to revoke a detention order entered last month, but the judge did not act on the request Monday.
Instead, the court entered his plea and recorded veteran Miami defense lawyer Jayne Weintraub as Knezevich’s permanent trial attorney in the case.
Monday marked close to a month in custody for Knezevich, who was arrested at Miami International Airport on May 4 after his estranged wife, Ana, disappeared from her apartment outside of Madrid in February.
Last Thursday, federal prosecutors disclosed copies of surveillance camera photographs that they assert shows David Knezevich at his wife’s apartment the night she vanished. A federal indictment accuses him of flying to Istanbul before renting a car, driving from Serbia to Spain, spray-painting the security cameras at her apartment, and leaving with a suitcase.
Weintraub on Monday filed a motion requesting a 30-minute hearing on her client’s attempt to revoke the detention order issued last month by Chief U.S. Magistrate Edwin Torres Jr.
In her filing responding to the government’s June 6 objection to the release of Knezevich, Weintraub wrote that the government added some information that had not been previously disclosed.
“For example, the government claims in its response that, since the [May 10] detention hearing, it ‘learned that the Defendant also used a stolen Serbian license plate during his travel to Madrid,'” she wrote. “This constitutes new evidence and new information that was not available to undersigned counsel when cross-examining the Special [FBI] Agent Montilla at the detention hearing.”
Weintraub, of the law firm of Sale & Weintraub, said she wants the opportunity to cross-examine Montilla about the new information during the hearing, which she said would be brief.
