One by one, the caregivers of Isabel Suárez Arias, who passed away on June 28, 2021, at the age of 85 in Madrid, described the abnormal circumstances and situations they endured in the house of actor Luis Lorenzo and his partner, Arantxa Palomino, during the time they cared for the elderly woman, the latter’s aunt. “There was no food in the house,” several of them agreed. “The fridge was empty,” “there was only milk and cookies and things like that for the two small children, the couple’s kids,” “one day I gave her some of my food, a sandwich I had brought,” “she managed as best she could”… “The poor woman slept very cramped, in the youngest son’s bed, almost on the floor,” another described. “She barely had clothes, one change of clothes that she put on and took off, I washed one and she wore it the next day,” they said. “Arantxa did not let her use the bathroom to relieve herself because she said it caused a very bad smell and I accompanied her to a communal bathroom in the building, in the garage,” several caregivers repeated. None of them were responsible for “Aunt Isabel’s” medication, as — according to what they said — her own niece supplied them, who was the one setting the rules in the house, they all agreed. “The little boy kicked the poor lady in the legs, provoked by the older one,” one of them recounted, recalling that she had to take her to the room twice so the minors would not assault her and that the elderly woman spent most of the time sleeping in her bed.
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The last months of life of the Asturian Isabel Suárez Arias were a real ordeal, in light of the testimonies heard on the first day of the trial against actor Luis Lorenzo and his partner, Arantxa Palomino, at the Provincial Court of Madrid. The Prosecutor’s Office accuses them of abuse and mismanagement and requests six years in prison. Meanwhile, the private prosecution, represented by lawyer Jaime Sanz de Bremond, accuses them of fraud, illegal detention (or alternatively, coercion), forgery of a public document, and abuse. The prosecution requests more than ten years in prison. According to the deceased’s relatives, her niece only wanted to keep her aunt’s inheritance.
The first accusation against the couple, for an alleged homicide, was dismissed after significant errors were found in the initial autopsy, which mentioned a possible “poisoning” of the elderly woman. The last caregiver of the octogenarian, who was with her when she died, is also accused in the trial, and the public prosecutor requests two and a half years in prison for her.
Eight hours waiting at VIPS
After the disturbing account of the caregivers, it was the turn of the waitresses at the VIPS in a shopping center near the accused’s house. They left her there for up to eight consecutive hours one day, until the café staff, alarmed, called the police. It was April 17, 2021: “When I arrived for my shift, between 12:00 and 13:00 in the morning,” one of the employees said, “I saw an elderly woman sleeping on one of the terrace tables.” The word spread among the staff and they decided to wake her up. They offered her something to eat, asked where her family was: “They went to do some things and will come to pick me up later,” the woman explained. However, hours passed and no one arrived. “We accompanied her to the bathroom,” “we gave her some fries to eat something,” “we asked for the phone to call her relatives”… Finally, when they found them, they said they had a flat tire with the car and were waiting for the tow truck. Later it was learned that they were at a birthday celebration at the Warner amusement park, others recounted.
They returned to pick her up “around 21:00,” both the employees and the local police officer who responded to the call agreed. “You are here because you want to be! No one has abandoned you!” the staff said her niece Arantxa shouted at the elderly woman upon arrival, “shaking her by the arm.”
Everyone agreed that the woman could not return home on her own, that “she would have become disoriented,” and they even asked her, but she said she did not know how to get back. Some even recalled that the elderly woman told them she wanted to return to Asturias because she had been brought to Madrid under false pretenses. The employees and the police agreed that they reproached Arantxa for the “abandonment” situation in which she had left the poor woman for an entire day, in an evident state of weakness.
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The version of the employees and caregivers contrasts greatly with that of Isabel’s Asturian relatives, who filed the complaint for “illegal detention” that led the Civil Guard to the couple’s home and their subsequent arrest after the elderly woman’s death, who barely survived three months in her niece’s home in Madrid. The relatives claim that Isabel was “in very good health,” that she lived her life fully until days before Arantxa took her to Madrid without warning. The elderly woman herself told her caregivers that “her niece had brought her to Madrid from Asturias under false pretenses” on March 10, 2021. “She lived alone in her house in Grado, 24 kilometers from Oviedo. She cooked for herself and others, when we went to eat, she went to the garden, picked her fruits, and the next day went to the city market to sell,” her siblings and another niece recounted. “The only thing she had was deafness and some small wounds on her legs, but mentally she was perfectly fine,” they noted, while recalling the many times they tried to contact her without success because no one answered the phone.
The caregivers, on the other hand, remember her with very limited independence, unable to go out on her own, with minimal autonomy, not very talkative, without a mobile phone… One of them recalled that one day she asked to borrow hers to call a relative in Asturias, but she did not remember the phone number well. “That caused me a huge fuss from Arantxa because her son told her I had lent my phone,” she recalled.
All the caregivers highlighted Arantxa’s difficult character, who, although she told them the priority was her aunt, gave them overwhelming house cleaning tasks, “very dirty.” Curiously, and as described by employees and managers of different companies, all workers came to provide their services in the house under an extraordinary sense of “urgency” that prevented signing contracts properly at the start, and Arantxa postponed formalizing them because she did not answer the phone or prevented proper communication with the intermediary company. “She neither signed nor paid,” concluded the manager of one company. “They were warned about aspects where they could be negligent and did not fix them,” explained a caregiver coordinator. “They did not buy the necessary medicines, sometimes we had to bring them ourselves, I think we even had to buy milk,” she added.
For these reasons, caregivers lasted between one and two weeks in the couple’s house. Many of them left voluntarily or were fired under the threat of being reported by Arantxa for being without a contract, they recalled.
The first session of the trial against actor Luis Lorenzo and his partner, Arantxa Palomino, visibly deteriorated, exposed the neglect, deficient care, and abuse suffered by “Aunt Isabel” living with them and their children.
