A 73-year-old resident commits suicide after being evicted from an apartment he occupied in the Raval district.

BarcelonaA 73-year-old man committed suicide yesterday after being evicted from the apartment he was occupying on Robador Street in Barcelona's Raval neighborhood. The eviction took place in the morning, and at that time the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) collected some of the man's belongings, such as his cell phone and ID. They also told him that he could later arrange with the owner how to collect the remaining items he still had in the apartment. However, in the afternoon, the man returned to the apartment to try to collect his clothes. This triggered the alarm that had been installed the same morning after he had been evicted and the apartment returned to the owner. The police arrived immediately, and the man asked to go back inside to collect his belongings. It was then that, while the officers were asking him to leave, he threw himself off the balcony of an interior courtyard from a third floor apartment, as reported by the police. The Country and the ARA has been able to confirm this from police and judicial sources. The same sources explained that the man died from the same fall and that nothing could be done to save his life.

Yesterday's eviction was the outcome of a judicial process that has lasted months. As reported by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), the owner of the property—a private individual, not a large landowner, according to the TSJC—filed a lawsuit demanding immediate repossession of the apartment. The case had been in the hands of Barcelona's First Instance Court No. 2 since February, and the deceased man knew since April 10 that he would be evicted from the apartment he was occupying yesterday.

During the proceedings, the judge communicated the owner's request to repossess the apartment to Social Services so that the necessary measures could be decided based on the vulnerability report they submitted. The technicians reported that the man had resigned from the City Council's Housing and Employment Intervention Service (SIPHO) immediately—days after the owner's complaint.

However, after his resignation, technicians from the SIPHO mediation service went to the apartment up to three times, but the man did not open the door. The workers left a note to contact him, but they also received no response, and finally informed the court that it was impossible to prepare a report to assess the neighbor's vulnerability. After the entire process, on April 9, the judge decided not to suspend the proceedings because the tenant's vulnerability could not be assessed, and because the man had not presented any objections to the complaint. Therefore, the following day, she set the eviction date for yesterday, Thursday, June 12. This final decision was communicated to the man.

"By the time you get here, everything has failed."

The news has sparked a reaction from the Renters' Union, which lamented in a statement: "When a person is about to lose their home, anguish and despair often prevail. They are the result of a system that has been failing for years" in guaranteeing the right to housing. "By the time we get here, everything has failed. Even the mechanisms that should be in place in these situations," the organization adds.

It hasn't even been a year since another case of Suicide related to an eviction also in Barcelona, ​​then on Navas de Tolosa StreetIn July of last year, two sisters, aged 64 and 54, threw themselves to their deaths from the courtyard of the attic where they had lived their entire lives. Several farewell letters were found in the apartment, in which they stated they were committing suicide due to the eviction. A few months earlier, in March of last year, A man in his 70s committed suicide in the Gràcia neighborhood of Sabadell after being evicted..