A couple of police officers from the scientific police returned yesterday afternoon to the basement of number 47 of the Horta Exhibition promenade. They worked with the windows open and a mask because the atmosphere was still stuffy. For several hours they inspected the scene where three bodies were found on Monday afternoon, that of a father and his two children, ages seven and ten. The homicide group no longer has any doubt that the 53-year-old man murdered his children and died with them. He boarded up the rented apartment and lit a charcoal brazier in the master bedroom. The boy appeared on the bunk bed in the brothers' room, and the little girl appeared next to her father on the sofa bed in the dining room. All three died from carbon monoxide inhalation.
The man, a Barcelona cleaning service worker for the company Fomento Construcciones y Contratas, prepared the crime thoroughly. He separated from the children's mother before the pandemic and she took custody of the children. The man had a visitation regime and the brothers spent Sunday with their father. That same day they were to return to her mother, but he asked her to let them sleep at home, that he would take them to school on Monday and that she would pick them up after class.
His idea was different. Because? The Mossos d'Esquadra will try to retrace the last hours of the alleged murderer, talk to his surroundings, and determine if he intended to kill the mother in life with the crime of his children, or there is something else that they have not been able to see yet.
On Sunday the man was in charge of sealing all the rooms in the small apartment. In the slots of the doors he placed rags and even a rug to cover any air inlets and outlets. He turned the room into a bunker.
The results of the toxic analysis will determine in the coming days whether the children were previously sedated with some medication that caused them to go into a deep sleep from which it was impossible for them to wake up.
The man lit the charcoal brazier and put his children to bed. The little boy in his bunk bed, on top, and the girl on the open sofa bed in the dining room, next to him. Death came to the three of them while they were sleeping.
Monday was the first day of school after the Christmas holidays. When the mother found out that her children had not gone to class, she began to desperately call her ex-husband, who was not answering the phone. She also called his mother, her paternal grandmother, and his sister. Neither of them knew anything.
The woman then filed a complaint and approached the apartment. From the outside, before the first Mossos patrols arrived, several neighbors saw her talking on the phone desperately, and banging on the windows of the house that overlook a community patio.
The following has already been told. The Mossos requested the presence of the firefighters, who opened the window gate and the glass, and entered the house. Beforehand, they ventilated the room from the smoke and secured it to allow the work of the scientific police, the homicide police, and later the judge and the coroner on duty, who carried out the removal of the bodies.
The room was messy, with a large crucifix on the dining room wall and some Santa hats still protruding from the bottom of the old television cabinet.
Yesterday, the sister of the alleged murderer denied on her social networks any possibility that her brother had killed her children and assured that it could only have been a domestic accident. She explained that her brother suffered from persistent Covid that had left him without sense of smell and that he surely was not able to realize that something was wrong. She insisted on the love she had for her children. Some messages that were followed by others from the man's co-workers, who praised what a good colleague he was.
The Catalan police will begin today to analyze the suspect's mobile phone and computer to try to find some more evidence that will help reconstruct those hours prior to the double crime. The brazier was newly purchased.
