The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has confirmed the sentence to reviewable permanent prison and two other sentences that add up to 39 years in prison. Thomas Handrick, the German citizen who in 2019 killed his wife and one of his sons, 10 years old, and tried to end the life of his second son, is six. The sexist crime occurred in a cave in the Barranco del Infierno, in the municipality of Adeje, in the south of Tenerife.
The Criminal Chamber has notified the appeal sentence that, although it fully confirms the sentence imposed on the German citizen, partially upholds his defense appeal, only in the sense of suppressing the aggravating circumstance of cruelty in the consummated murder of the child who died immediately after his mother, attacked with the same stone.
The High Court has concluded that there was no evidence to consider proven that the defendant caused his son tremendous unnecessary suffering “knowingly”. The phrase in quotation marks is deleted from the final wording of the sentence, leaving unchanged the rest of the proven facts determined by the Fifth Section of the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the sentence that resolved the case in first instance, issued on the 17th February 2022.
The TSJC confirms, therefore, the bulk of the sentence that gave legal form to the guilty verdict issued by the jury on February 4. The popular court found the defendant guilty of a crime of murder with the aggravating circumstance of treachery and kinship in reference to his son (for whom the reviewable permanent prison sentence was now imposed), of another crime of murder with the aggravating circumstance of kinship in reference to his wife (for which he was sentenced to 23 years) and a third of attempted murder with the aggravating circumstances of treachery and kinship in reference to his second son, for which he was charged 16 more years in prison.
As has been said, only the application of the aggravating circumstance of treachery in the murder of the child is suppressed, “without affecting the sentence imposed for the murder of the minor subject to permanent reviewable prison”, when the treachery concurs, explains the resolution.
Proven facts
The sentence confirms as proven facts that, in the morning hours of April 23, 2019, in an isolated area of the municipality of Adeje (Tenerife) near the road from Ilfonche to the Quinta, the accused attacked his wife and, with With the intention of causing her death, “he hit her repeatedly with force, using both his hands and some stone, until he managed to make her fall to the ground inside a cave, at which point he hit her with a stone weighing about eight and a half kilograms until crushing his skull and finally causing his death.
It adds that the defendant, in order to carry out such an act, had intentionally led his wife and two sons, aged seventeen, to an isolated place where they could not receive any help, “without the possibility of defense.” effective”.
According to the ruling, when the defendant’s eldest son came out in defense of his mother, he was “violently and repeatedly beaten by his father with his hands and using stones, until he fell to the ground inside a cave.” There, the man killed him in the same way as his mother.
The sentence adds that, after witnessing that his father assaulted his mother and his brother, the youngest son decided to flee the place, leaving the defendant, in the belief that he would not survive, given his ignorance of a narrow and lonely terrain.
In addition to the criminal convictions, the sentence imposes various accessory penalties on the defendant and requires him to pay compensation worth tens of thousands of euros.
The appeal ruling is subject to appeal before the Supreme Court.
The story of the surviving child
According to different sources at the time, the couple was in the process of separating and the woman had traveled to the south of Tenerife with the children to visit the 43-year-old father, who took them on an excursion to the cave where the events occurred.
The minor who managed to escape, only six years old at the time of the events, managed to reach an inhabited area, where he was found by a woman who spoke German and was able to communicate with him.
The child’s testimony, which was recorded so as not to have to repeat his story, led to the arrest of his father and, after a search device, it was possible to locate the bodies of the woman and her son, both with signs of violence. The little boy was placed under the provisional guardianship of the Government of the Canary Islands and, days later, he returned to Germany, where the rest of his family lives.
