He must also pay compensation of 17,000 euros to each of the victim’s five brothers and 50,000 to each of his two children.
The presiding magistrate of section 3 of the Provincial Court sentenced the defendant to 15 years and 5 months in prison for killing his girlfriend in the El Peral neighborhood (Cartagena) and dismembering her body, hiding it in two garbage bags in a freezer to , later, deposit it in two containers.
In addition, it condemns him to pay compensation to the relatives of the deceased, of 17,000 euros to each of the five brothers of the victim and 50,000 to each of his two children. On the 3rd, the jury found ASM guilty of a crime of homicide, with the aggravating circumstance of kinship and gender, and of desecration of a corpse, also with the aggravating circumstance of kinship.
In the verdict issued, the members of the jury declared proven that the defendant “intentionally caused the death” of his partner, with whom he had lived since 2016. And, subsequently, “out of respect for his memory of the aforementioned, he sectioned his corpse with a knife and a saw, separated the head and the upper and lower limbs from the body, and cut the trunk into two pieces; then he put each of the sections in two garbage bags and placed them in the freezer of his home, to later, on an undetermined date, dispose of them by throwing them into two containers ». The bulk of the discrepancies fell on the homicidal action, since the defendant admitted in plenary that he had dismembered the body with a knife and a mechanical saw.
The defense insisted that the defendant did not kill the woman and that the victim suffered from serious ailments that could have been the trigger for her death. However, the jury, unanimously, leaned towards the thesis of the accusations and declared the defendant to be the author of the death, pointing out up to six pieces of evidence that support that conclusion. Of these, the magistrate stands out as the most relevant, the fifth, referring to the behavior of the accused after finding the lifeless body of his partner. “It is in no way assumable, because it is absurd and unusual, the reaction he had to the alleged panic attack that the defendant said he suffered when contemplating and personally verifying (he was not breathing) the death of his partner if, as he affirms, nothing had what to do with it – he recounts in the sentence -, and much less that he dismembered it, frozen it, scattered it in garbage containers and remained silent for many months, “he concludes, to then detail the other five signs pointed out by the members of the jury to justify its verdict.
For the determination of the sentence, the magistrate agrees with the accusations that the convict is deserved to receive the maximum punitive reproach. The concurrence of two extenuating circumstances and “the merciless attitude towards the victim’s relatives for almost a year, distressed by the prolonged and inexplicable disappearance of his mother and sister, demand that the sentence be carried to the legal limit,” he explains in the resolution.
And the same is argued regarding the crime of corpse desecration. “The aggravating circumstance of kinship also determines that the penalty be imposed in its upper half, and if the enormous seriousness of the offense is added to the memory of the deceased, to the extreme degree of dividing her mortal remains, freezing them and finally throwing them into two garbage containers to make them disappear irreversibly, the consequence can not be other than sanctioning it with the maximum penalty provided, “he concludes.