Accompanied by her mother, the 16-year-old teenager who was assaulted on Wednesday by a man in the elevator of her home in Barcelona’s Eixample, went to the doctor this Thursday. She is serene. It is her mother who she shouted for help when the individual who had sneaked in behind them on the stairs and in the elevator, put a knife to her neck, covered her mouth and threw her to the floor while pressing the floor buttons. superiors. The Mossos d’Esquadra that are investigating the event have no doubt that the individual’s intentions were not to steal the young woman’s phone, but to sexually assault her. In fact, the information has already been transferred to the Central Sexual Assault Unit (UCAS) to check whether the man, who died after falling from a height of the sixth floor while fleeing, may be related to other assaults on similar women.
The events occurred on Wednesday at three in the afternoon in a building on Aragó Street. The teenager was returning to her house when a young man on a bicycle entered behind her. She herself explained to this newspaper that she was not suspicious because she thought it was one of the many delivery drivers who work in the city.
It so happens that the young woman’s block has a second security door in the main lobby. The young woman also opened it and the man followed her, leaving her bicycle on this second landing and entering the elevator with the woman. She had time to press the button for the apartment where she lives before the man attacked her, threatening her with a knife. She covered his mouth, threw him to the floor and pressed the buttons for the upper floors. But the elevator stopped near the victim’s home before she began screaming for help and calling her mother. Several neighbors alerted by the screams came out of her houses and so did her mother. The assailant snatched the young woman’s mobile phone at that moment, and left the elevator down the stairs, followed by several neighbors who kept a safe distance due to the threat of the knife.
What happened, since when he reached the bottom, the individual was locked in. He did not know how to open the security door with the button on the wall. At that moment and with the neighbors a short distance away shouting at him to throw the knife on the ground, the man began to shout: “Let me out.” “Let me out.”
Desperate, the criminal re-entered the elevator and a neighbor tried to stop him from closing the door, but he managed to climb to the top floor. Up there, the man found the access door to the roof closed and also the security door. Cornered, the individual began to hit the glass skylight with a backpack and opened a space between the glass through which he sneaked in.
Once on the roof he tried to reach a neighboring block to escape. He hung on a wall and it is possible that he slipped because he fell onto a ridge. The roof gave way and the man fell from a height of the sixth floor, reaching the patio of a hair salon. The individual died instantly.
He had no documentation, but investigators had no difficulty identifying him by fingerprints. The man had numerous records for different crimes, almost all of them related to assets. However, he did not have any reviews for crimes against sexual health. This does not imply that the sexual assault police check with similar assaults pending resolution.
This Thursday, the neighbors on the stairs were still scared. Ángel López was one of those who was home at that time and who came out when he heard the young woman’s screams. “We redoubled security precisely because of the attempted robberies we had suffered. But this is very serious and terrible. Fortunately, she managed to get away,” he commented.
