Marcos is a good person and a good neighbor and that is why he did not think twice when on December 29 he told Mrs. Montse, the owner of the second floor of his staircase, to come with him to his house. Montse was still terrified hours after discovering the lifeless body of Choumicha, 38, to whom she had been renting a room in her house for a year.
That afternoon almost at the end of the year, Montse, 72 years old, dared to enter the room of her tenant and by then already a friend. He had not heard from her for a couple of days and a “strange smell” began to come out of that room and spread throughout the house. She agreed to open the window and ventilate. And it was when she retired that she discovered a foot sticking out of a mountain of clothes piled up on the bed. Montse ran out of her house, called 112, and a Mossos d’Esquadra patrol approached number 353 Navas de Tolosa street and confirmed that the woman was dead and showed signs of violence.
Choumicha’s body had several stab wounds from which she bled profusely until she was discovered. The homicide group and the scientific police carried out the visual inspection and sealed the room. A week later, on Epiphany Eve, investigators arrested the alleged murderer, aged 31. Of Moroccan nationality, like the victim, both had a relationship, with comings and goings. In 2020, Choumicha already denounced him, but at the time of testifying he backed out, and the court closed the procedure due to lack of evidence. Two years later, in 2022, the woman reported him again for threats. The trial was set for October of this year.
While the police and the violence against women judge continued their work, Montse was still unable to return to her home, where she lived with Marcos and her family. The room, the scene of the crime, remained sealed a week after the suspect’s arrest and the increasingly intense smell made it impossible to live in the rest of the house.
The week of January 15 and after several calls to no avail, Marcos, who decided to help his neighbor and took the lead in the efforts, managed to get the Mossos homicide agency through an intermediary to authorize them to access the room. Many days had passed and even though all the windows were wide open, the stench made it almost impossible to breathe.
The murderer tried to hide the victim’s body using a large amount of clothing that was soaked in blood. There were also remains on the walls, the bed base, some furniture and the mattress that acted as a sponge.
Marcos reached for the phone again. And the difficulties began. He started with the Mossos, to whom he asked what he should do with the woman’s things, with the clothes and belongings stained with her blood. “They told me that they already had everything they needed and that they were not responsible for the cleaning. That he should try calling the Barcelona City Council,” says Marcos. And that’s what he did, going from one office to another, for several days, until someone gave him a reference to a private company that charged them 200 euros to clean the blood. The man continued to insist and tried a phone that, after the crime, they offered him from the Feminisms Department for anything they might need: “They washed their hands.”
Marcos decided to roll up his sleeves, pack and seal all the blood-soaked clothes and belongings in garbage bags, and disinfect and paint the room himself. But the bloody mattress was missing. He insisted again. “The Mossos told me to take him to a green point.” And he did that. He wrapped it in plastic and took it to the one closest to his house, but when the person in charge knew what it was about, he told him to take it to the green point, but to La Maquinista. “How?” he asked. “Well, by bus,” they told him.
He didn’t think it was appropriate to take a bloody mattress on a bus and he thought about taking it down to the bins on the corner of his house, but every time he did, he discovered someone trying to take it away. He recovered it and called the Mossos again, who assured him that there was no responsibility if he got rid of it on the day of the furniture collection.
Meanwhile, Montse continued sleeping at her neighbors’ house because of the stench that mattress gave off. Last week, Marcos stood guard on the street and waited for the arrival of the collection service to deliver the mattress by hand.
The vast majority of municipalities in Catalonia are responsible, if requested by a victim, for the disinfection and cleaning of blood from the scene of a crime. But in Barcelona, ??given what we have seen, it seems not. No one, at the moment, has claimed Choumicha’s body either.
