Jon Musetescu, who was 29 years old at the time, killed three people in less than an hour in the center of Barcelona in January 2020. Agents of the Urban Guard reduced him by pounced on him, still with the knife in his hand, in the Plaça Sant Jaume after stabbing the life of his last victim, the journalist David Caminada. Today the trial against the defendant, a Swedish national, for whom the Prosecutor’s Office is requesting a sentence of 95 years in prison for three crimes of murder, five violent robberies and one crime of arson, has started at the Barcelona Court. Musetescu has been in prison for three years and since then has continually changed lawyers. The lawyers who have assisted him always tried to convince him that, given the clarity of the evidence against him, he should claim that he suffered from a mental illness or that he was under the influence of drugs. However, the defendant opposed any defense strategy and insisted that he was not the author of the facts.
In the first session of the trial, his lawyer wanted his client to be acquitted because he was not responsible for the crimes with which he was charged. “He denies everything,” she said. The prosecutor, for his part, has explained that he has no doubt that the defendant is the author of “this barbarity” and has explained to the members of the jury that during the investigation “no disorder has been noticed to apply a mitigation ”. However, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has been forced to withdraw the request for reviewable permanent imprisonment that it requested following the doctrine of the Supreme Court that establishes that this measure can be claimed in cases of crimes against minors or when a person has committed several crimes. This last assumption was the one that the prosecutor intended to apply, but the new doctrine of the TS suggests that these are cases in which the defendant already has a record for a crime, something that cannot be applied in this case because all three are prosecuted at the same time. .
It was 3:00 p.m. on January 20, 2020 when at a home on Calle Portal Nou, in Ciutat Vella, the defendant allegedly assaulted a man in his 40s, Héctor Alejandro Núñez, stabbing him 254 times. He then suffocated him by tying a bag over his head. From there, the defendant began a spiral of violence that would end with his arrest. After killing his first victim, he set the house on fire and lowered himself down the side of the building until he reached the ground. He entered the narrow streets of the Gòtic neighborhood until he ran into Concepción Rosa, a 78-year-old woman and mother of four children, who was leaving the gate of her house on Arc de Sant Vicenç street. There the defendant gave him several blows to the head and suffocated the woman while she stole his wallet, mobile phone, watch and keys. “He took advantage of the victim’s inability to defend himself by acting surprisingly and unexpectedly,” the prosecutor says.
The violent outburst of the defendant continued on Montcada street, where the Picasso museum is located. He stole a motorcycle at knifepoint, beat a driver to the ground, and left the area. Before committing the third crime, Musetescu still had time to enter an establishment on Carrer del Bisbe to rob him, but the person responsible for him refused to give him the money and the defendant turned around and left. Already in the Sant Jaume square, he approached the journalist David Caminada, who worked in the communication department of the Barcelona City Council, and tried to steal his backpack. He resisted and the defendant stabbed him twice in the chest. Caminada, who was also a university journalism professor, died two days later. A friend of his tried to intercept the assailant and also suffered a cut on his hand. After this latest attack, the Guardia Urbana agents who were in front of the town hall were able to subdue and arrest Musetescu.
