“I am just a mother. The mother of a wonderful boy who has only been able to turn 20 years, three months and 21 days. My son's name is Josep Boan Rosanes. And Josep will not be able to enjoy the life that his father and I gave him because a driver decided to step on the accelerator and drive at more than 130 km / h on a country road with no shoulder ”.
This is how Maria Pilar begins a crude and emotional story in which she narrates how it feels to have lost what she loved most in this life.
Added to the immense pain for the irreparable loss of such a young son for this family is the contempt for life "of a judicial system that has only sentenced the driver who killed Josep to two years in prison." The culprit of this incident has not stepped nor will step, at least for these facts, jail.
María Pilar puts herself in the shoes of all the families that go through the same drama and has proposed to end this impunity with the victims of trafficking. “It could not be that my son has been considered – by dying because of a traffic imprudence – as a fourth category victim”, affirms the woman.
Josep, who was on a motorbike (he was on vacation with his father in Galicia) was hit by that car that “missed three signals and didn't lift the accelerator pedal when taking a curve; he hit our son like a missile, ”the story of that letter continues.
Josep's father, a witness to the accident, returned home without his son “And what happened to the driver of the car after he took our son away? Nothing at all. After going through a medical checkup, he returned home.
And 15 days after having killed Josep, he published a photo sitting in a bar, his thumb raised in victory, a friend by his side and the two of them in front of a beautiful potato omelette. And under the photo a text titled 'When life gives you a second chance'”.
Maria Pilar is especially hurt by these messages from the person who took the life of her son, "because with these comments he makes it clear that he is not aware that he is not the victim of an accident but rather the person responsible for an accident."
They are drivers like him, he adds, “those who do not respect the rules, who believe that they can drive their cars as if they were on a race track. They are the ones that cause the death of hundreds of people each year and the consequent pain of the thousands of people who have lost them”.
This woman, a resident of Barcelona, does not enter her head that her son, within the traffic statistics, "has lost his name". She maintains that Josep is now "just another number on the list that the DGT published in 2020", the year of the accident.
Maria Pilar refuses to accept "that my son, our children, are just a number on a newscast, a percentage in a press conference or a simple 280-character tweet"
And he wonders: “And the murderers? What do we know about those who have killed our children, brothers, parents, friends...? What do politicians, traffic managers, judges and prosecutors or the media say about them? Well, they explain little or nothing to us. Why exactly does nothing happen to them ”, he affirms.
Josep's mother recalls that in Spain, "killing another person in a road accident is punishable by a minimum of 1 year and a maximum of 4 years in prison and no financial penalty."
A much more benevolent law than in other countries, such as France, "where the sentence is 3 or 5 years in prison (depending on the seriousness of the homicide and without any margin of choice for the judge) to which economic sanctions are added of 45,000 or 75,000 euros for the murderer”, indicates Maria Pilar.
What is this woman asking for in the campaign she just started on Change.org? "Change the law so that the years in prison increase when the speed of those offending drivers exceeds the maximum speed allowed on the road of the accident by 50 kilometers."
Now that limit is in Spain at 80 kilometers on interurban roads and 60 on urban ones. "Thirty kilometers more than what is included in the road laws of countries like Italy and France," adds Josep's mother. That is now his fight.
