The Criminal Chamber of the TSJC He not only rejects the defendant’s appeal against the ruling issued at the time by the Fifth Section of the Tenerife Court, but also abounds in the concurrence in the case of the aggravating circumstance of cruelty, qualifying the third stab wound that the convicted today dealt his partner as “luxury evil” that, explains the TSJC, “It is not necessarily identified with the number or repetition of blows, but rather 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 condemned the defendant -with a history of habitual mistreatment, threats in the field of violence against womenbreach of sentence and abandonment of family- to 18 years and six months in prison as the author of a crime of attempted murder (for the aggravating circumstance of treachery and cruelty) with the concurrence of the aggravating circumstance of kinship and in medial concurrence with a crime of violent robbery with the mitigation of damage repair.
In addition to the criminal sentence, the defendant was ordered to pay the costs of the process, the prohibition to approach the victim for more than 10 years than the sentence imposed, to compensate her and her daughter with 40,000 euros and to pay the Canary Health Service the medical expenses for the treatment of the victim, 87,967 euros plus those that are accredited in execution of the sentence.
The sentence accepts as good the proven facts in the ruling of instance. According to them, 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 Vinos (Santa Cruz de Tenerife).
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 from this attack, when the accused “delivered a stab wound to her abdomen, holding the knife and pressing while the woman tried to get up.”
“I told him he was going to die”
Subsequently, he removed the weapon from her body, while “he told her on successive occasions that she would not leave the house alive.” After a while, after about forty 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 in the ground, 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. As 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”.
Account numbers
At this juncture, the aggressor demanded that his victim provide him with the details of his cards and bank accounts, of which he was the co-owner along 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 hitting her several times, checking that she was not moving”took the keys to her partner’s vehicle, the documentation from her bag, as well as the mobile phones, and left the house.
From there, with the data obtained, ordered two bank transfers, from her checking account to her own account, for a total amount of €1,700, to later withdraw €1,300 at ATMs. Later, she texted her sister saying that she had stabbed her partner.
In the afternoon, researchers from the Civil Guard they contacted him, on successive occasions, to negotiate his delivery, to which the accused finally agreed.
Thus, around 9:40 p.m., he turned himself in to the agents. At the time of his arrest, he informed her that he had the knife inside the vehicle, as well as documentation, his wife’s cards and €1,355 from said extractions.
Around the same time (2 in the afternoon), upon verifying that her assailant had left, the badly injured woman managed to get up, opened the door of the house and dragged herself down the stairs to the street. There she was rescued by several passers-by, who notified the police forces and the health media.
Picked up and treated by a medicalized ambulance, she was taken to an emergency medical center and given the seriousness of her injuries and blood loss, transferred to the University Hospital, where she underwent surgery.
As a result of these attacks, the victim required surgical and psychiatric treatment. She took almost six months to reestablish herself, dragging sequels that last to this day.
