A resident of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a police officer by profession, has become one of the first people in Spain to serve a sentence for neighborhood harassment, after the Supreme Court has dismissed his last appeal against the judgment of the Provincial Court.
The ruling sentenced him to six months in prison, a fine of fifteen months and the payment of 3,000 euros for moral damages.
In May, the courts launched the process of collecting the fine, agreeing to pay it at a rate of 300 euros each month, as proposed by his defense. But the main extreme that must be met is to cease the continued harassment of the affected family.
This judicial process was opened after a family from Santa Cruz de Tenerife suffered for years from the behavior of their neighbor. It all started in 2015, when the already convicted person began a series of actions aimed at “insistently and repeatedly monitoring, intimidating and harassing his neighbor”, who lives with five other people (his three children and his parents).
Every time the victim took the dog out for a walk, the defendant made the encounter and invited her to go out together, but the woman’s refusal led to the harassment beginning.
Likewise, he proceeded to constantly photograph the family and those who went to the house, as well as their vehicles.
He also stood in front of the complainant’s car to prevent her from leaving the garage, according to the proven facts of the sentence of the Criminal Court that sentenced him in the first instance.
That court, first, and the Court, later, took for granted that the accused shouted expressions with the clear intention of causing fear in the complainant, such as “they do not know who they are messing with”, “I am a member of the Corps and Forces of State Security”, “I am going to make your life bitter” or “when do we put a price on your head”.
If he realized that the woman was cleaning the house and “for some reason she was alone”, then he told her to stop and repeated that it was going to make her life miserable.
When family and friends reunions were held, he rebuked the attendees and said he was going to call the police.
At that time he took photos of the attendees and their cars, “with a defiant attitude.” On one occasion when some workers were putting up a wooden pergola in the house, the accused hit hard with a metal object and told his neighbor “that when she picked her up alone she was going to cut her neck, making gestures with her hands that I was going to shoot him while carrying”.
The woman got scared and ran to take refuge inside the house while the condemned man gave several blows and kicked the garage door of the house with such force that it left a mark.
It was also common for him to hit the adjoining wall violently and the insults were also constant.
The dictates of the successive courts have described his behavior as “harassment”, which also materialized in the presentation by the convict of complaints before the public administrations, the Local Police or the Data Protection Agency.
Before Urbanism, he filed continuous requests alleging that the works that were carried out in the complainant’s house were illegal, none of which prospered after verifying that they had the pertinent permits.
This man’s anger also arose when the rugs were shaken. On one occasion, the now condemned man “ended up mad, uttering curses and insults.” Once again, he filed a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency for the placement of some video cameras that, according to him, were aimed at his home, which was ruled out by this agency.
After all this suffering, the affected ended up suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress. The expert psychologist who examined her ruled out a possible mental psychotic disorder that had triggered these accusations and concluded that the neighbor’s behavior was the only continued stressful factor that triggered the sequelae she suffers from it.
