Negligence, tedium or carelessness in the things to which we are obliged.
Laziness is the seventh of the seven deadly sins and closes this series of murderers who in recent decades have carried out horrific crimes in Spain. This last sin is surely the most complex to illustrate with an event. Kill for laziness? It's not like that exactly. But if we reread the definition made by the Royal Academy of Language, we will agree that Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra were obliged to take care of Asunta, whom they had adopted 12 years ago in China when she was just a baby after a tedious legal process. They neglected her, they didn't care about her and the most incomprehensible thing, even though they had been separated for some time, they agreed to kill her.
Because? Since they never confessed, they never explained it. On the contrary, they always denied it, despite the large amount of evidence that the investigators found that pointed to them and the lies and contradictions that they verbalized in their first statements. But in general terms, that beautiful smart, gifted and sensitive girl annoyed them. To both.
The mother's entourage and some sources of the investigation agreed that one of the reasons that best fit the facts, although absurd, was that Asunta no longer fit in the new life that Rosario was planning. And the most surprising thing is that her father was fine with the idea of getting rid of her in a drastic way.
On September 21, 2013, Asunta Basterra consumed high doses of Orfidal, given by her parents. That same day, at night, Rosario and Alfonso reported the disappearance at the Santiago de Compostela National Police station. A few hours later, already at dawn on the 22nd, two men located the lifeless body of the girl on a forest track in Feros, in Teo, a few kilometers from the Porto family home. Someone had left the body on a small embankment and took care to deposit it gently, as if the girl was sleeping.
The mother was arrested after the wake, on the 24th. The following day, after a new search at the house in Teo's village, the father was also arrested. The girl died of suffocation after the high intake of anxiolytics.
After the investigation by the Civil Guard and the instruction of the magistrate José Antonio Vázquez Taín, the case came to trial amid great expectation and with the hope that one of the two would break the pact that at some point they sealed to end the daughter's life and tell what happened. That it be clarified who had the courage to verbalize the idea of killing Asunta first. But not. Alfonso and Rosario kept their distance from each other, denying any responsibility for the crime and, most surprisingly, without accusing each other either.
The Superior Court of Xustiza de Galicia confirmed the sentence of 18 years in prison for the murder. The Civil and Criminal Chamber rejected the appeals presented by the defenses and introduced a correction to the ruling handed down by the Provincial Court of A Coruña. Alfonso was not the material author of the murder of the little girl in the family chalet, but Rosario suffocated Asunta to death, fulfilling a joint plan preconceived months before.
Neither the investigation nor the trial managed to place the father at the scene of the crime that night. But there was no doubt of his responsibility in the previous plan to end the life of the little girl. In fact, more than one pointed to the father as the instigator of the murder with the aim of regaining the attention of her ex-wife, who had started a new relationship with a married man at that time.
The last stretch of Rosario's life before the crime was marked by an illness, depression, accentuated by lupus, for which she was admitted to a hospital. Sentimental fluctuations affected him. On July 4, 2013, Rosario and her lover broke off their relationship; That night, the woman would situate, days later and downplaying the importance that she deserved of her, the assault of a hooded stranger at her house to try to kill her daughter. In fact, the girl told a friend of hers on WhatsApp, and she took a photo of herself with a mark on her neck. Her mother, who claimed to have surprised the intruder, did not consider it necessary to report the assassination attempt. No one forced the portal or the door of that house. After that July 4, the lovers did not see each other again until September 20; and the next day, Asunta was assassinated.
As soon as the judge authorized it, the little girl was cremated and her ashes collected by an old family friend who left them for a time in the apartment on Doctor Teixeiro street in Santiago where she always lived. The same home where she began receiving crushed lorazepam tablets at her breakfast. Rosario, who after the death of her parents inherited an important real estate heritage, was renovating one of those apartments. A new home in which she had commissioned a room to be soundproofed so that Asunta could play the piano, one of her great hobbies. She was a virtuous. It is curious how Rosario planned the death of her daughter while continuing to design her life.
After several frustrated attempts, Rosario Porto was found dead in her cell in the Brieva jail in Avila on November 18, 2022. She was 55 years old. She hanged herself with the cord of her robe when she no longer applied any anti-suicide protocol. Asunta Yong Fang's mother (eternal aroma) had already tried to take her life repeatedly in the previous prisons where she had served her sentence, Teixeiro in A Coruña and A Lama in Pontevedra. She finally got it months after arriving in Ávila. Her lawyer explained after her death that the prison authorities never answered her inmate when she requested that the psychiatrist who was following her case in Galicia and her lawyer could visit her.
In the summer of 2017, months after ending up hospitalized for one of her first suicide attempts in the Teixeiro prison, Rosario sent a letter in her own handwriting to the Galician correspondent for El País explaining why she wanted to die. Throughout nine pages on sheets torn from a squared notebook, the woman also spoke of the "professed love" for the girl. She gave her vision of the instruction and reviewed abundant details that according to her they had wanted to ignore to build the story that was sought, both from justice and the Civil Guard and from the media. Until her death, she maintained the tradition of publishing an obituary in the Galician press in memory of the girl. “Assign Yong-Fang. In memoriam. I will Always Love You. Mother". They are buried together in the family vault.
