The Provincial Court of Tenerife has imposed a global sentence of 73 years in prison and the payment of 68,000 euros to three men who entered the house of an 80-year-old woman in Cross port at night, they beat her, robbed her, and kept her kidnapped for three hours. The events took place in the early morning of June 27, 2019, around one in the morning, at which time the three convicted persons appeared at the house in order to seize all the valuables that the owner had.
According to judgmentThey were also aware that they were going to cause physical harm, or at least intimidate the victim. The Prosecutor’s Office maintained that the facts constituted a crime of robbery with violence and intimidation in an inhabited house, with the use of a weapon and illegal detention, all carried out with the aggravating circumstances of having carried out these crimes disguised and abusing their superiority.
For all this, he requested the same number of years in prison and compensation of 68,500 euros, while the private prosecution brought by the family adhered to what was requested by the Prosecutor’s Office but increased by 30,000 euros compensation for moral damages caused. Once inside, the detainees woke up the old woman and intimidated her with a kitchen knife 22 centimeters long and 12 centimeters wide, taking advantage of her delicate state of health and her bewilderment when she saw three hooded people in the middle of the room. early morning.
The woman was subjected to repeated, violent, and serious blows to her face, head, and body; they squeezed her neck tightly, exerting pressure as if they were going to strangle her. The three men used duct tape to bind the victim’s hands and feet, gagged, immobilized and covered her mouth so that she could not call for help.
During the three hours in which the thieves were inside the house, they searched it and violently forced a safe into which there were gold bars worth 70,000 euros, without being able to open it. Finally, from the woman’s wallet they took documentation and barely 100 euros in addition to some jewelry that she had worn the night before. The attackers left the house around four in the morning and the victim would be found five hours later by her assistant.
after receiving medical assistance it was found that she suffered head trauma, concussion and hemorrhagic infarction, bruises on her neck from attempts to strangle her, multiple blows to the face and right eye. Injuries all of them that took 45 days to heal, since three of the sequelae were very serious, 10 serious and 32 moderate.
The sentence indicates that the assault caused the aggravation of his previous state due to age and greater cognitive deterioration and functional capacity, personality disorder and alteration of brain functions, mood swings, reduced social life and the need to count with help for daily chores. The neighbors who found her in the morning saw her standing at the door, in a state that they described as “unfortunate”. with traces of duct tape on the legs, neck and arms, blood and signs of having been beaten.
The house it was also completely scrambled and highlighted the safe that had not been able to be opened. The victim could hardly speak and with great difficulty she explained that she had been assaulted by two men, she had a lost look and was “as if absent.” In the identification of the perpetrators of the crimes, the interpretation of the images that appear on the video surveillance cameras was essential, both that night and in the previous days. In this way, two men who were in the building were observed, one of whom opened the doors with his elbows, in order not to leave traces, among other suspicious movements.
The images They were distributed by the island’s police stations and the response was immediate: they were criminals with a history of robberies. The monitoring of mobile phones in their name or that of relatives also determined that they had been in the place that night, and the defendants were not able to offer a coherent version of both this fact and that they were hanging around the building in previous days.
The explanations offered by the defendants and the people around them were “flimsy” and were also identified in a lineup by the guards and some witnesses who confirmed that the physical characteristics of the hooded men coincided with those of the convicted.
