Barcelona"Time will tell, she'll pay for it all. I'll screw them up twice." With this message, the accused murderer his ex-partner in the Clot neighborhood of Barcelona in 2022 He warned one of the victim's sisters a few days before the crime.
The 37-year-old man sits in the dock this week while a jury spends almost two weeks determining whether there is sufficient evidence to confirm that he strangled his ex-partner, who was 26 at the time, to death on March 21, 202. a common child who has been in the custody of his maternal family since the murderThe man has been in pretrial detention ever since. He confessed to the crime and faces up to 42 years in prison.
The victim's two sisters and brother described the defendant's controlling and jealous behavior during the trial in the Barcelona Court. "There were insults, shouting. The arguments were daily; I saw him slap my sister," explained the youngest member of the family, who lived with the couple for a time. In fact, the couple's breakup was due to him hitting her.
Control and Jealousy
On one occasion, the young woman explained, the accused even hid a camera to monitor how her then-partner interacted with a friend who visited her home. The three brothers explained that the man frequently wanted to control her cell phone and often demanded that she unlock it to read her messages. He also routinely demanded "proof" of where she was and who she was with if they spent time apart. These behaviors, the victim's brothers explained, occurred from the beginning of the relationship they shared between 2014 and 2021. However, things escalated when, after the breakup, the girl started dating another boy. In the final stage, it became common for the man to follow her or wait for her at the door of her workplace.
The episodes recorded in the Prosecutor's Office's indictment for the trial date from the month before the crime. In February, he intercepted the woman as she was returning to pick up her son from his grandmother's house and threatened her with a knife to force her to go upstairs to his house with the child. On March 16, five days before the crime, the young woman was walking with her new partner and their son when the accused approached her and emptied a beer can over her head. The woman reported him. It was on that day that the man warned the victim's sister that he planned to stab her and her current partner. Two days later, the victim returned to the police station to expand her complaint on previous incidents, but she was never able to confirm it in court because she was murdered.
Murder, abuse, and threats
The highest sentence requested, 42 years in prison, is the one filed by the private prosecution on behalf of the victim's family, while the Prosecutor's Office is seeking 38 years in prison. In addition to murder, he is also accused of habitual abuse in the context of gender-based violence, a crime against privacy, harassment, and serious threats.
For its part, the defendant's defense admitted that he is not entitled to an acquittal, but during the trial will seek a considerably lower sentence of 15 years in prison. To do so, they will try to convince the jury that the crime was not murder but intentional homicide, meaning that although he killed her intentionally, he did not do so because she was defenseless or by causing her more harm than necessary. The defense also requests mitigation for having confessed to the crime from the outset and another for allegedly having consumed drugs and alcohol that prevented him from realizing what he was doing.
A sexist crime is also being tried in Salou
A trial also began this Wednesday in the Tarragona Court for a sexist crime committed on July 2, 2023, at a hotel in Salou . According to the charges, the man strangled the woman with a hair straightener's electric cord because she refused to accept the breakup. She had left him the same day as the crime after an argument.
Both were Irish, and during the first day of the trial, the victim's mother and several employees of the hotel where they were staying testified. Among them was the receptionist, who, alerted by the noise and screams, went up to the second floor and found the defendant covered in blood, next to the woman's body, trying to revive her.
In this case, the prosecution is seeking a 21-year prison sentence, while the private prosecution, on behalf of the family, is seeking 30. The defense, however, denies all the charges and requests acquittal.
