Negligence, tedium or distraction in the things to which we are bound.
Laziness is the seventh of the seven deadly sins and closes this series of murderers who have committed horrific crimes in Spain in recent decades. Surely, this last sin is the most complex to illustrate with a real fact. Kill for laziness? It’s not quite like that. But if we reread the definition given by the Institute of Catalan Studies, we will agree that Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra were obliged to take care of Asunta, whom they had adopted twelve years ago in China, when she was only a child, after a long legal process. They neglected her, they were unconcerned about her and, most incomprehensible, even though they had been separated for a long time, they agreed to kill her.
Because? Because they never confessed, they didn’t explain. On the contrary, they always denied it, despite the large amount of evidence that investigators found pointing to them and the lies and contradictions that they verbalized in the first statements. But generally speaking, that beautiful smart, gifted and sensitive girl bothered them. To both
The mother’s environment and some sources of the investigation agreed that one of the reasons that was most in line with the facts, although crazy, was that Asunta no longer fit into the new life that Porto was planning. And the most surprising thing is that the father liked the idea of ??getting rid of it in a drastic way.
On September 21, 2013, Asunta Basterra consumed high doses of Orfidal, provided by her parents. That same day at night, his parents reported his disappearance to the Santiago de Compostela National Police station. A few hours later, on the morning of the 22nd, two men located the girl’s lifeless body on a forest track in Feros, in Teo, a few kilometers from the family home of the Porto family. Someone had left the corpse on a small embankment and took care to deposit it gently, as if the girl were sleeping.
The mother was arrested after the vigil, on the 24th. The following day, after a new search of Teo’s house, the father was also arrested. The girl died of asphyxiation after the high intake of anxiolytics.
After the investigation by the Civil Guard and the instruction of the magistrate José Antonio Vázquez Taín, the case came to trial amidst great anticipation and with the hope that one of the two would end up breaking the pact that at some point they sealed for killing his daughter and explaining what happened. Let it be clarified who had the courage to first verbalize the idea of ??killing Asunta. But no. Both kept their distance from each other, denied any responsibility for the crime and, most surprisingly, did not accuse each other either.
The Superior Court of Justice of Galicia confirmed the sentence of 18 years in prison for the murder. The Civil and Criminal Chamber rejected the appeals presented by the defense and introduced a correction to the decision issued by the Provincial Court of A Coruña. Alfonso Basterra was not the material author of the murder of the girl in the family villa, but Rosario Porto suffocated Asunta to death fulfilling a joint plan preconceived months ago.
Neither the investigation nor the trial succeeded in placing the father at the scene of the crime that night. But there was no doubt about his responsibility in the previous plan to kill his daughter. In fact, more than one pointed out the father as the instigator of the murder, with the aim of regaining the attention of his ex-wife, who had started a new relationship with a married man at the time.
The last part of Rosario Porto’s life before the crime was marked by an illness, depression, accentuated by lupus, for which she ended up being admitted to a hospital. The sentimental swings affected him. On July 4, 2013, Porto and his lover broke up; that night the woman placed, days later and withholding the importance it deserved, the assault of a hooded stranger in her home to try to kill her daughter. In fact, the girl related it on WhatsApp to a friend of hers, and took a picture of herself with a mark on her neck. The mother, who assured that she had surprised the intruder, did not consider it necessary to report the attempted murder. No one forced the portal or the door of that house. After this July 4, the lovers did not see each other again until September 20, and the next day Asunta was murdered.
When the judge authorized it, the girl was cremated and the ashes were collected by an old friend of the family, who left them for a while in the apartment on Calle Doctor Teixeiro in Santiago, where she always lived. The same home where he started receiving crushed lorazepam tablets with breakfast. Rosario Porto, who after the death of his parents inherited an important real estate heritage, was renovating one of those flats. A new home in which he had commissioned a room to be soundproofed so that Asunta could play the piano, one of her great hobbies. She was a virtuoso. It is curious how Porto planned the death of his daughter without ceasing to design her life.
After several failed attempts, Rosario Porto appeared dead in the cell of the Brieva prison in Avila on November 18, 2022. She was 55 years old. He hanged himself with his coat cord when no anti-suicide protocol was in effect. The mother of Asunta Yong Fang (eternal aroma) had already tried to take her own life several times in the previous prisons where she had served her sentence, Teixeiro, in A Coruña, and A Lama, in Pontevedra. He finally succeeded months after arriving in Ávila. Her lawyer explained after her death that the authorities of the penitentiary center never answered the inmate when she requested that she be visited by the psychiatrist who was following her case in Galicia and her lawyer.
In the summer of 2017, months after being hospitalized for one of the first suicide attempts in Teixeiro prison, Rosario Porto sent a letter written by her to the Galicia correspondent of El País in which she explained why i wanted to die Over the course of nine pages torn from a grid notebook, the woman also spoke of her “professed love” for the girl. He gave his view on the instruction and reviewed abundant details that, in his opinion, had been overlooked in order to build the story that was being sought, both from the judiciary and the Civil Guard and from the media.
Until his death, he maintained the tradition of publishing an obituary in the Galician press in memory of the girl. “ Assume Yong-Fang. In memoriam I will love you forever. Mom”. They are buried together in the family cemetery.
