Esperanza went to the neighborhood hairdresser once a month. She was always accompanied by her son Xavier, who dropped her off at the Raffel Pages on Carrer Pujades, when she turned the corner, and then picked her up. Manel, the husband, hardly left the house. Both were unwell and had a bad season. The man, with very advanced Alzheimer’s, and she, with a platelet deficit that made her very weak and meant that she had to go every two to three times to the Hospital del Mar to get a transfusion.
The couple lived on the first floor of number 73, Carrer Lope de Vega, in Poblenou. And the son, Xavi, also moved there, after becoming unemployed and deciding that he would dedicate himself exclusively to caring for his parents. All three turned up dead yesterday. The son killed first the mother, then the father and then committed suicide.
A shocking sequence that made neighbors’ hairs stand on end. That section of Lope de Vega still maintains low houses with lifelong neighbors. In the afternoon, when the police and judicial entourages had left the area, Esperanza and Manel’s friends gathered on the terrace of the bar next door to draw their own conclusions.
Hypotheses that, in the absence of what the judicial investigation says, agree quite well with the first indications of the police of the Barcelona homicide group. A son overwhelmed by the care of parents who were getting worse and worse. And he himself with a complex mental situation that had led him to suffer severe episodes of depression. An emotionally terrible cocktail that could lead to the various scenarios in which the researchers work. Among which, that of the so-called assisted suicide, in which the mother, because the father was no longer in a situation to make decisions, would have proposed to the son his will to give up everything; and the man would have helped them, but then he would also have ended his life.
The find took place around ten in the morning. The woman who went to the home twice a week to do housework and help the elderly couple, found the woman’s lifeless body. She was the one who alerted the situation.
Only the woman was at home, but the father and son were missing. Nor was the family vehicle on the street, where it was always parked. At that moment, the Mossos started a search for the car, and located the eldest daughter of the couple, Anna, who told them about the house in an urbanization in Molins de Rei. The Mossos moved there. The father had been killed and the son had committed suicide.
