Asunta, Gabriel, Olivia, Anna… some of the murdered victims who shook society paraded through the jury room of the Barcelona Court this Thursday. The memory of these children removed from their seats the members of the popular jury judging Cristina Rivas, the woman who in May 2021 killed her daughter and tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide. In the months prior to the crime, the accused compulsively searched for all types of information related to children murdered either by her parents, or by the partner of one of them, as was the case of Gabriel Cruz.
This has been detailed by the police in charge of analyzing all the material they found on both the defendant’s phone and computer. The police have testified as experts ensuring that all the searches in those previous months respond to a pattern of behavior. “They are totally logical, rational queries. It seems as if she has executed a plan until reaching her final goal.”
And that final objective was none other than to kill his four-year-old daughter with the sole objective, maintains Prosecutor Félix Martín and the prosecution lawyer, Mireia Gómez, of causing all possible pain to the girl’s father, of whom She had separated two years ago and tried to get back together after learning that the man had started a new romantic relationship.
Cristina and her only daughter were living at that time in her maternal grandmother’s house, in Sant Joan Despí. The woman took advantage of the fact that the girl was completely asleep under the effects of a sedative substance that she herself gave her the night before to suffocate her using a plastic bag. She later tried to commit suicide by taking several medications, but she managed to be revived by emergency medical personnel, alerted by the maternal grandmother who found the two bodies.
After listening to the story of the scientific police officers who detailed the visual inspection of the crime scene, it was the turn of those responsible for the analysis of the accused’s devices and they became protagonists of the day.
The prosecutor maintained his didactic tone in the questions to make the work of the jury members easier.
That Cristina killed her daughter is clear. She herself admitted it during the investigation. And according to the words of her lawyer, Eugenia Sobrino at the start of her hearing, she will admit it in her statement, which will be the last day.
What prosecutor Felix Martín and the prosecution intend is to demonstrate to the jury that the woman did not act in an outbreak of alienation, but rather did so out of pure evil and after planning the crime in advance. Hence the importance of this Thursday’s session in which the Mossos have detailed those almost obsessive searches for two months of news, videos and reports and everything that appeared on the Internet related to fathers and mothers who murder children, and in the consequences of those crimes.
He didn’t just look for that. She also had fun finding information related to how to kill a child by suffocation, using everything from hands to a cushion to plastic bags. She also searched for the types of medications used to put a child to sleep or kill her; she was interested in several items related to fentanyl. And an article by a psychologist who published an opinion in El País about why fathers and mothers kill their children. A text that the lawyer Mireia Gómez asked the police to read out loud the summary they made in the report. The text assumes the thesis that fathers and mothers kill their children to harm their partners, making reference to the Medea syndrome, which the lawyer also cited in her first intervention in the trial before the jury.
The accused also asked how to get a firearm and although the experts have not been able to specify why, they have assured that they were struck by the fact that in the letter that Cristina left her father she said: “If I could have killed my father “I wouldn’t have done it for my daughter.”
The almost compulsive search carried out by the accused for everything that had to do with Rocío Carrasco also did not go unnoticed by the police. In those days, Rocío Carrasco’s daughter was starring on Tele 5 in a series titled “Tell the truth to stay alive.” The prosecutor has asked the police about the relevance of this search. The Mossa has recalled how Carrasco narrated in first person the alleged mistreatment that she received from her ex-husband Antonio David Flores and how she began to feel an “emotional disconnection from her children who took a position with their father.” her”. For the investigators, the accused adopted some of the phrases that Rocío Carrasco insisted on repeating in the documentary and in all the interviews she subsequently conducted related to the subject. “I gave birth to this girl” or “Because I gave birth to her.” Expressions that Cristina reproduced literally in the farewell letters that she left written to her parents and her ex-husband.
At another point in her extensive statement, the mossa in charge of defending the police expert report has narrated how among the searches carried out by the accused, during a period, everything that had to do with white magic, black magic, Santeria abounded in order to recover to a loved one. “There was a search for moorings or ceremonies to recover a couple and we found images of her with Sergio along with candles and letters,” the police detailed.
In short, the prosecutor was interested in the court understanding that none of these searches, which are carried out until practically the moment of the crime, are accompanied by others linked to a possible bad emotional moment. At no time did the investigators locate any searches or calls interested in understanding whether he was suffering from depression or seeking to counteract the desire to kill his daughter that he demonstrated with the searches for how to do it.
And not only that, all these searches were carried out in a context of normality and order that did not distort their daily lives, until the last moment. Cristina was able to kill her daughter by leaving everything ready. She actually phoned the parking lot where she had the car, which she took care of leaving in her father’s name, to deregister it. She also called work to warn that she would not be going and even to school the night before, to explain that the girl would not be going.
Such was his discipline that he consulted sample letters. How to write a farewell before committing suicide.