“Excellent” children, dedicated parents: everything seemed perfect before the Castro Urdiales crime

A municipal police car stops in front of a row of townhouses in a nondescript urbanization in Castro Urdiales (Cantabria). Soon, the blue lights multiply. The agents move between a garage and one of the houses, the one with number three. From that point, a deployment is organized to look for two children who have to be somewhere in the town. An operation is ordered to be mounted at all exits. A woman has been found dead and tied up in the back seat of her car, which is pressed against the wall of her garage. Her name was Silvia, she was 48 years old and the agents will soon confirm what they fear at that moment, that it is her own children who have killed her.

Five frantic hours then unfolded until the whereabouts of the minors, aged 13 and 15, were found. It is the children's maternal grandmother who ends up giving the idea of ​​looking for them in a park about 20 minutes from her house with a cliff overlooking the Cantabrian Sea. There they find them, at two in the morning, stuck in a bunker, sheltered from the cold and wind. She begins the enigma: How were two teenagers capable of something like this? Until Wednesday, the family of Silvia, Javi and her two children was one more, almost idyllic. She, caretaker; he, a factory worker; The children are “excellent” students, according to the mayor of the Cantabrian municipality. They lived in an urbanization called Paraíso, but that one afternoon became hell.

The church that the family went to regularly, in the center of Castro Urdiales (32,000 inhabitants), continues with its routine of masses early in the morning and late in the afternoon. A small temple decorated with a striking mural in which Jesus Christ appears surrounded by fishermen, as a sign of the coastal personality of this town bordering the Basque Country. “In these times, unity is needed, as we have seen these days,” the priest slips into his homily, perhaps in reference to the turmoil that the quiet town has experienced since the crime occurred.

In bars, people interrupt their conversations when the news talks about the murder. In one of them, a woman cries when she sees Silvia's image on the screen. She knew her. She doesn't want to talk about it, the pain and perplexity are still too overwhelming. The couple was originally from Bizkaia, where they both worked, but they had chosen the Cantabrian town for years, as many Basques do, in search of the most affordable access to housing that the area offers. 10 years ago they adopted their children J. and E., born in Russia. They were brothers and they did not want to separate them.

The children's school, subsidized and religious, is located in an urbanization in the upper part of Castro Urdiales. At eight in the morning the day after the news broke, the cars parade to drop the little ones off at school. They enter in stages, first those from the lower classes and then those from secondary school, where Silvia's children studied. This Friday they should have celebrated the carnival party, but the celebrations have been suspended. “A teacher told them that it was not going to be celebrated because the mother of some classmates had died,” says the mother of a student, who now, she says, tries to find the answers to all the questions that she asks about what happened. “The first day, there was total silence when we waited for the children to come out,” this woman remembers. Next week is a holiday, also due to the carnival celebrations, which the City Council suspended when the news broke. “It will be good for them to disconnect and digest what happened to the children,” reflects this mother.

The only ones who know what the intimacy of the family was like are its own members, the rest can only help compose the portrait and that is what the investigations are now focusing on. The eldest son, 15 years old, and the only one who can respond criminally for this homicide, has uncovered a story of abuse, insults and isolation. This is how he justified the attack of fury that triggered the crime. According to his version, that afternoon his mother became angry because of his grades in a class. In her statement before the juvenile prosecutor's office she pointed out some details that have led to the investigation being opened in other directions. The teenager claimed that he had talked about this situation at school, that his friends saw the bruises and that the neighbors heard them screaming. All this must be verified.

The family environment and those close to him deny it. Among his more or less close acquaintances, a bubble of protection has been created around a family that has been involved in a nightmare. “She was a smiling and discreet woman, I have gone on several excursions with her with the parish, the four of them always went together, it is a whole drama that is impossible to explain,” says Celia, a catechism classmate who had known her for a couple of years. “She was excellent and generous, they didn't miss mass even on a Sunday,” says Marian, another member of the same group. “What is being said does a lot of harm and what he has said [el hijo mayor ante la fiscalía] “It's not like that,” says a friend of Silvia's through tears, who prefers not to say her name. “The family is crushed,” says the priest of the church where the couple attended with their children before saying that he is not going to talk about the issue anymore. “The grandparents went out of their way to care for those children,” says a resident of the urbanization as the only point.

The facts are more or less clear, the evidence collected during almost two days at the crime scene coincides with the story of the eldest son, 15 years old, the only one who is attributable. Now, researchers are trying to fill in the gaps in that story. On Wednesday afternoon, the woman meets the two children at home and is attacked with a knife. The eldest son claims that his mother hits him during a strong fight and that he reacts. According to his version, his little brother only helps him in the attack. Then they lower the body into the car, which is in the garage. One of the reasons that remains to be answered is why they stripped and tied up her mother before leaving her in the back seat. They throw all the clothes into the container on the street. The boys start the car, but none of them know how to drive, so they crash into the garage wall and decide to flee on foot. They carry a backpack with some clothes, a little money and Silvia's cell phone.

At 10 to eight in the afternoon they go to have a snack at a pastry shop next to the parish where they went every Sunday with their parents. The clerk, Alicia, remembers it well because there were 10 minutes left before closing. “I have to put it for you to take away, little one,” she told her older brother. They ordered a colacao, a cappuccino and two coconut palms. Since he only had one of that type left, he gave them another one that was half coconut and half chocolate. And they left the establishment. The mother's phone didn't stop ringing. It was her grandmother, whose house is not far from hers. They take him and tell him that something has happened to his mother and that they are kidnapped. The grandparents alert the father and the Civil Guard, who come to the house around nine at night, and the agents discover Silvia's body. A search for the children then begins that lasts five hours. It is the grandmother herself who leads the agents at dawn to a park overlooking the sea where she had previously taken her grandchildren. They had chosen another familiar place to take refuge.

Based on the experience of previous cases, even if it is possible to reach the reason that triggered the homicidal rage, this does not satisfy the search for the why. Nobody still understands what drove José Rabadán to annihilate his entire family at the age of 16 one night in his home in Murcia in 2000. Nor is the explanation that V., 17 years old, gave for ending the life of José Rabadán satisfactory. his father and stepmother shot at a farm in Toledo in 2020. He said he did it because they would not let him travel to France with his mother.

Ana Isabel Gutiérrez is a forensic psychologist from the Clara Campoamor association. A few years ago she also worked at the Interadop adoption agency and was in charge of evaluating parents whose children were going to come from Russia. “According to the elements I know, planning is conspicuous by its absence in this crime and a 15-year-old adolescent already has the capacity to prepare. Regarding the motivation that he has explained, the specialists will now analyze the impact that this hypothetical abuse could have had to establish conclusions for the judicial process and also for his subsequent therapeutic treatment,” she explains.

The investigations are now progressing in two ways: “On the one hand, the police investigation is being carried out as in any crime, samples have been collected at the scene and the minor's story will be verified. On the other hand, there is the investigation of what he has declared, for which everyone around him will be interviewed.” As the mayor of the municipality, Susana Herrán, defended on Thursday, the children were not “at all conflictive”, but “academically excellent.” Furthermore, the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, also noted that there was no complaint regarding this family. “To establish what the reality of a family and social environment is like, we use multi-sourcing, that is, consulting the same thing with many actors to draw conclusions, because what some define as normal for others is not,” he details.

At this moment, according to the forensic psychologist's experience, psychological work also begins in the reform center where the adolescent has been admitted so that he can process what he has done. The judge has issued a six-month confinement measure and the child is under public guardianship. The first has asked to see his younger brother and the latter has asked to go to mass this Sunday, according to The Montañés Diary. In the juvenile justice system of Spain, it is understood that all convicts are “potentially recoverable,” and that is what will be worked on, through therapy, with these adolescents. “Integrating what they have done will be the most difficult, because you cannot erase people's minds. The job of psychologists will be to guide them towards the future,” she specifies. A future that now seems very dark and in which it is possible that all the whys will never be answered.

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