The Criminal Chamber has notified the appeal ruling that, although it fully confirms the sentence imposed on Thomas Handrick by the Provincial Court, partially upholds his defense appeal, only in the sense of suppressing the aggravating circumstance of cruelty in the murder of the child who died immediately after his mother, attacked with the same stone.
Thus, it has concluded that there was no evidence to consider proven that the defendant caused his son tremendous unnecessary suffering “consciously”, he points out in a note.
The people’s court has already found the defendant guilty of a crime of murder with the aggravating circumstances of treachery and kinship in reference to his son (for which a 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 circumstance of treachery and kinship in reference to his second son, for which he was charged with 16 more years in prison.
Children of 10 and 7 years
In this way, the sentence confirms how proven facts that, in the morning hours of April 23, 2019, in an isolated area of the municipality of Adeje near the road from Ifonche to the Quinta, the accused attacked his wife and, with the intention of causing her death, “hit her repeatedly with force, using both his hands and a 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 her 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 children, 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 condemned man killed him in the same way as his mother.
The sentence adds that, after witnessing his father assault his mother and brother, the German’s youngest son “decided to flee the place, leaving the accused, 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.
