The 53-year-old man who was found dead on Monday afternoon along with his seven- and 10-year-old children in his rented apartment in Horta, Barcelona, ??prepared the crime. The laboratory results of the samples collected during the autopsy that was carried out this morning will confirm whether the children were given any prior substance that would guarantee deep sleep at the time the children inhaled carbon monoxide. Before, he was in charge of sealing all the air inlet and outlet holes, including the window cracks, which he sealed with insulating tape. The first preliminary result of the autopsy does not specify the causes of death, pending the results of the toxic analysis. Even so, the Mossos d’Esquadra must have found something else from the homicide group and the scientific police who this afternoon were already considering the crime as the main hypothesis and ruling out the domestic accident. A crime that has a name: vicarious violence, and that is about killing your children to inflict the greatest possible pain on the mother.
This Tuesday it was difficult to find among the residents of number 47 of the Horta Exhibition promenade any scene between the father and his children that would foreshadow a crime being investigated by the Mossos d’Esquadra homicide group. Only Fina, the second’s lifelong neighbor, who for thirty years was a nursing assistant at the Mercè psychiatric clinic, a few meters away, reproduced an episode that she has put out of her head and that on Monday prevented her from sleeping. “A few months ago, in the summer, the mother left crying because her daughter did not want to stay with her father. The girl said no and the mother convinced her that she had to stay, that she would pick her up the next day.” , the woman recalled, also crying because she liked to see the children playing with the ball in the building’s community patio. “The girl was beautiful, like my granddaughter,” Fina said.
The family of the man and, until now, the alleged murderer of his children, also spoke out this Tuesday. One of the sisters denied on her social networks that the father had been capable of harming her children. What’s more, the woman recounted how her brother had Covid, which left her with a loss of smell that would have prevented her from discovering any anomaly in the home.
The man rented the ground floor of the house shortly before the pandemic and as soon as he separated. It was common to see him playing ball with his children in the community yard. A scene that caught the attention of the twenty families in the block, almost all of them already of age, and where those two brothers were the only children in the building.
