The couple’s arrest of the woman whose remains were found last March 4 in a container of Granada (Alt Penedès) turned this homicide into a new sexist crime. And it further obscured the tragic balance of deaths that has been recorded during the first four months of 2022 in Catalonia: five wives and one daughter they have been murdered by their spouses in just four months. EL PERIÓDICO reconstructs the story of the five victims: Mercedes, Maria Carmen, ivet, Africa Y Natalie. They were mothers of nine children. One of them, Natalia’s 16-year-old daughter she was also killed by her father. six victims in four monthsthe worst balance since 2014. That year started just like this 2022 and ended with the fateful number of 14 crimes.
Except in the case of the crime of Lloret de Mar (The Jungle), in which a Russian businessman allegedly murdered his wife and daughter, in the rest of the deaths there was a history of violence. The neighbors of Mercedes, María Carmen or Ivet, murdered in Martorell (Baix Llobregat), Sant Sadurni d’Anoia (Alt Penedès) Y Barcelona, respectively, had heard fights through the walls. The family from Africa, who died at the hands of his ex-boyfriend in Vilanova del Cami (Anoia), had detected that her boyfriend was trying to isolate her and even tried unsuccessfully to convince her that she was in the hands of a “violent” person. In the case of Mercedes, the neighbors also reported that she was a woman who suffered from serious health problems and that she did not receive any treatment.
In 2020, after verifying that the environment of five of the eight murdered victims then knew about the situation of mistreatment and did not notify, the current spokesperson for the Mossos d’Esquadra, Montserrat Escude, appealed “to the co-responsibility of all”. “When a case is detected, it must be reported: to the police, to entities, to anyone. It is very important that the affective or work environment helps the person,” he pleaded. The present 2022 has started worse than 2020 and points to an even more ‘deaf’ environment, or more impotent. Two of the five victims, María Carmen and Ivet, had reported their abusers.
Diego Y Jonathanex-boyfriends of Ivet and Africa, killed them because they did not accept that they wanted to separate.
Mercedes
February 20 Mercedesin his 50s, was hit in the head with a metal bar until death inside the home that both shared in Martorell. After killing her, her husband went outside and was seen by a neighbor in a nearby parking lot. He was covered in blood and was very upset, banging his head against a tree. The Mossos d’Esquadra they went to calm him down and soon deduced that the blood that covered him was not his, it was Mercedes’, whose body was found shortly after by the agents in their house, lying on the floor of the apartment.
The residents of this block of flats affirm that Mercedes suffered serious mental health problems and did not receive any medical treatment. The night before they heard that she and her husband got into a violent argument. “She had threatened us all with death. We had tried to get the authorities to put her in a center and we had even warned the police that things were going to end very badly,” they assure this newspaper. Her husband, they remember, had gone to a community meeting to clarify that Mercedes refused to receive psychological help. According to neighbors, Mercedes had poisoned a family dog, scratched cars in the farm’s parking lot and even spread poison next to the entrance doors of some houses. “We had filed several complaints for threats against her that now no longer make sense. I wish they had helped her psychologically & rdquor ;, lament the neighbors.
Maria Carmen
On March 4, the dismembered corpse of Maria Carmen, 54 years old, was found in a container in the center of La Granada. From the outset, the Mossos arrested his 45-year-old brother, who was the one who deposited his remains in that container. Two months later, the police arrested Mercedes’ boyfriend, whom they consider to be the perpetrator of the crime. The role of the brother remains unclear. They are both in prison.
María Carmen’s parents had six children and ran the Bar Ortiz, which was on the ground floor of the family residence, located in Passage Terol de Sant Sadurni d’Anoia. His parents passed away and the brothers left. María Carmen continued to live there. She had four children with two different men. After her, she began a last romantic relationship with the man who would end up killing her, who had already been convicted of ill-treatment. A neighbor often overheard them arguing. María Carmen ended up denouncing him and a judge issued a restraining order. However, she, despite her aggression, accepted that she return to settle at home when she was released from prison.
No one knows when she was killed. Police sources emphasize that she had been dead for weeks when her brother entered the home that had previously been the Ortiz Bar and, according to what he told the Mossos – who do not believe him – he found plastic bags that he mistook for the remains of a dead animal and the deposited in the La Granada container.
ivet
On March 21, ivet25, stabbed to death in Barcelona by her boyfriend Diego, father of her child. Ivet separated from Diego at the end of 2021 after more than seven years together. But she was still fond of him and she continued to come for some time to the flat the couple had shared in the Gran Via of Les Corts Catalanes. During those visits fights broke out that the neighbors heard through the walls. Some were so worrying that neighbors ended up calling the police.
Claudia, Ivet’s sister, suspects that Diego, the day he killed her, went to wait for her in front of their son’s school, located not far from there. And that when Ivet left school, with a knife in her hand, Diego forced her to follow him to his home on Gran Via.
Three days before being murdered, Ivet had filed a complaint against Diego. “She told me that she was very afraid of him, that Diego followed her down the street, or to work, that he always carried a knife hidden and that one day he had placed it on her stomach and neck to warn her that if she wasn’t with him, I would not be with anyone. That he would kill her if she left with anotherClaudia recalls. Shortly before murdering her, Diego learned that Ivet had another partner.
The day she was murdered, March 21, Ivet was summoned to a court in Barcelona to testify against Diego. “He’ll get out of jail sooner or later, but my sister won’t. It’s not fair,” Claudia reasons.
Africa
On April 15, Africa44, was stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend in Vilanova del Cami (Anoia), from whom he had intended to separate for two months, a decision that he did not accept. Mother of two children from a previous marriage, Africa lived with one of them, her daughter. To endure her coexistence with her abuser, mother and daughter went up every night to sleep on the upper floor of the home.
Antonio, Africa’s father, explains that he had warned his daughter as soon as she started dating Jonathan that he was a “violent” man. “But she didn’t pay attention to me, she was in love,” she lamented in an interview with this newspaper.
Africa and Jonathan started dating 3 or 4 years ago, his father recalls. With the beginning of that relationship, the woman’s visits to her parents, who live in the same town, began to dwindle. “Now we know that he tried to isolate her, cut the link she had with us. But she didn’t tell us anything, so as not to worry us,” recalls her father, who had tried to warn her when he found out who she was dating, a man who had already mistreated her. a previous couple. “I told him he was violent but he didn’t listen to me,” she laments.
On April 15, during the Easter holidays, Jonathan returned home at 3:30 in the morning. He went upstairs and attacked Africa with a knife, in front of his daughter, whom he also tried to stab.
Natalie and her daughter
April 19th, Natalie53, was allegedly murdered in Lloret de Mar (The Jungle) for her husband, Sergey Protosenyawho also killed his daughter that night and then committed suicide.
Related news
The Mossos d’Esquadra believe that Sergey attacked his wife and daughter while they were sleeping. He first killed her daughter, whom he knocked unconscious with a blow to the head, before stabbing her with a knife. Later, he did the same with his wife. Finally, he went outside and hung by his neck from a railing. All the evidence gathered during the investigation points in that direction. However, the fact that Sergey was a director of a gas company and that the day before, on April 18, another Russian businessman in the same sector did the same thing in Moscow – kill his wife and daughter and then commit suicide – has triggered rumors about what happened within this wealthy family.
This crime is not very related to the previous ones. There are no reports or records of domestic violence. Natalia and Sergey were not separating and, according to her son –the couple had another son who was in France that night– her father was incapable of committing this massacre. The investigators are now trying to clarify if there was a communication prior to the double crime between this businessman and the one who did the same thing in Moscow.