There is no one in Tàrrega who did not know Joan Anguera, the 86-year-old neighbor who was shot to death in the back early Friday morning when two individuals attacked his home to rob him.
The home that the victim shared with his wife and a brother, both of whom were injured during the attempted robbery, remained sealed yesterday by the Mossos d’Esquadra, who returned over the weekend to work at the crime scene. A house that was actually a large warehouse, attached to another house that was used as a home, on Segarra street.
No one passing by could even imagine that there, in that house with the wooden blinds about to fall apart because they were old and poorly maintained, a fortune could be hidden. But that’s how it was. The residents of Tàrrega and the surrounding area knew this, accustomed to listening to Anguera, who liked to talk about what he had had or had.
Hence, investigators from the homicide group in the Ponent region have no doubt that the assailants knew where they were going, and that Joan Anguera was not a victim chosen at random.
Some thieves who climbed to the first floor of the balcony of the house, around five in the morning on Saturday, when not a soul passed by on that street. They gained access easily and the first thing they did was find the brother, whom they tied up.
Some noise must have woken up the couple because Anguera asked the woman to bring him the gun that the man had been keeping for some time. It was not the first time he had been the victim of a robbery. The neighbors remembered yesterday how a few years ago others who tried to rob him came out with their heads open from the blow they received from the man with an iron bar.
At some point he bought the gun, which he kept in case someone dared to assault him again. They also knew that Anguera kept a weapon at home in Tàrrega and in the neighboring town of Anglesola, where he went daily to have a fork lunch with a group of friends who even on Saturday did not forgive the ritual of celebrating life with good food at the bar. Mil.leni.
In Tàrrega, at the Paco bar, on the other side of the train tracks, and a stone’s throw from the house, they also remembered Anguera with affection yesterday. “In that warehouse he kept anything you could imagine. And if he didn’t have it, he would get it for you,” commented Emili, who laughed remembering the day he needed a forklift and he got one.
Without children, but with several nephews from his wife and another brother who showed up in Tàrrega that same Saturday, Anguera always smoked cigars, a Cuban spearman, and not long ago he had bought another house in cash in the town for his wife. in case something happened to him.
A bully of manner and attitude, he had been weaker for a season due to the effects of dialysis on which he had been dependent for two years. The newspaper Segre published on Monday how Anguera was telling the town that he kept gold ingots. “If it were only that…” recalled another friend who claimed that the real fortune was in antique jewelry and a lot of cash that he collected from the rents of a lot of properties.
“He paid with a 50 bill for any nonsense he got out of a bunch that who knows what there was,” another recalled. Stories of a lifelong neighbor, whom they appreciated, but of whom yesterday in Tàrrega no one had any doubt that they went to look for criminals in the area whose ears reached the treasures that Anguera was hiding.
