The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has ratified the sentence of 18 years in prison for a man who tried to murder his wife in an attack that he describes as “luxury evil”, as he forced her to give him her bank passwords, He left her dying and emptied her accounts.
In this way, the TSJC has confirmed in all its terms the sentence of the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which in November last year sentenced a resident of Icod de Los Vinos, in the north of the island, to 18 years in prison. for the attempted murder of his wife, whom he stabbed three times with treachery and cruelty.
The Criminal Chamber of the TSJC thus rejects the defendant’s appeal against the ruling issued at the time by the Fifth Section of the Tenerife Court, and abounds in the concurrence in the case of the aggravating circumstance of cruelty, since it qualifies the third stab wound that the today condemned he hit his partner as “luxury evil”.
The TSJC explains that with this qualifier “it is not necessarily identified with the number or repetition of blows, but in its unnecessaryness for the intended purpose, which was to end the life of the woman out of simple jealousy, in such a cruel way.”
The sentence now ratified on appeal sentenced the accused, with a history of habitual abuse, threats in the field of violence against women, breach of sentence and abandonment of family, to 18 years and six months in prison as the author of a crime of murder in attempt (due to the aggravating circumstance of treachery and cruelty) with the concurrence of the aggravating circumstance of kinship and in medial contest with a crime of violent robbery with the extenuating circumstance of repairing the damage.
In addition to the criminal conviction, the defendant was imposed the costs of the process, the prohibition to approach the victim for a period of more than 10 years than the sentence imposed, to compensate her and her daughter with 40,000 euros and to pay the Canary Islands Service of Health the medical expenses for the treatment of the attacked, 87,967 euros plus those that are accredited in execution of the sentence.
The sentence confirms the proven facts contained in the court ruling, according to which the defendant had been in a relationship with the victim since August 2019 and in January 2020 they began to live together in a home in the municipality of Icod de los Wines.
On March 11, 2020, around 9:00 a.m., the defendant returned home, after taking the victim’s youngest son to school.
There, a conversation began with her partner about the expenses they had and certain loan applications that were coming to her, as well as other personal issues.
At one point, the woman said that they should end the relationship and that he should leave the house and take his things, without the defendant verbally objecting.
Around 10:20 a.m., she went to the bathroom and when she was sitting on the toilet, he came in by surprise, armed with a large kitchen knife and with the intention of ending her life.
The woman was unable to resist or defend herself against this assault and the defendant “stabbed her in the abdomen, holding the knife and squeezing as the woman tried to get up.”
Subsequently, he removed the weapon from her body, while “he told her on successive occasions that she would not leave the house alive.”
After about 40 minutes in this situation, when he left the bathroom, she “took the opportunity to try to leave the house or ask for help, being intercepted at the door by her aggressor, who grabbed her, took her inside and on the floor, moments later, with the same knife, he stabbed him a second time, also in the abdominal cavity”.
The ruling relates that these two wounds caused a large hemorrhage and great physical pain to the victim and while she bled to death, he “continued to tell her that she was going to die.”
At one point, with the woman lying on the ground, the convicted man answered a phone call on his partner’s cell phone, apparently from the school of her youngest son, “which motivated him to project his threats on the minor, stating that if he returned home the child would have to kill him. This increased her psychological suffering, increasing the pain and physical suffering previously caused by her two wounds in her abdomen”.
In this situation, the aggressor demanded that his victim provide him with the details of his cards and bank accounts, of which he was the co-owner together with his mother.
After that, with the final intention of cutting her throat, the ruling continues, “he made a cut of about fifteen centimeters from side to side on the neck, although this wound did not affect vital structures, nor main vessels, nor respiratory tract”.
However, the aggressor believed her dead and “after giving her several blows verifying that she was not moving”, took the keys of the woman’s vehicle, the documentation from the bag, as well as the mobile phones “and left the house.
With the data obtained, he ordered two bank transfers from her current account to his own account for a total amount of 1,700 euros and then withdraw 1,300 at ATMs.
Later, he sent a message to his sister saying that he had stabbed his partner.
In the afternoon, the Civil Guard investigators contacted him on several occasions to negotiate his delivery, to which the accused finally agreed.
Thus, around 9:40 p.m., he turned himself in to the agents and at the time of his arrest reported that he had the knife inside the vehicle, as well as documentation, his wife’s cards and 1,355 euros from said extractions.
In advance, the victim, upon verifying that her assailant had left, managed to get up, open the door of the house and drag herself down the stairs to the street, where she was helped by several passers-by, who notified the police forces and the sanitary facilities.
The woman was transferred in a medicalized ambulance to an emergency medical center and given the seriousness of her injuries and blood loss, to the University Hospital of the Canary Islands, where she underwent surgery.
As a result of these attacks, the victim required surgical and psychiatric treatment, took almost six months to recover and has sequelae that continue to this day.
