The man who locked up, mistreated, and ended up killing his pregnant partner in Manresa (Barcelona) in 2023 has admitted to homicide and accepted a sentence of 26 years and 2 days in prison in a plea agreement reached with all the prosecution parties. He was charged with assault, murder, and an abortion offense with an aggravating factor of gender, and with the agreement, he avoided facing a trial with a popular jury. The sentence, pronounced in voce, includes compensation of 175,000 euros for each of the heirs of the victim’s father, who died a few months ago, and for her mother, whom the accused will not be able to approach or communicate with for 25 years after his release from prison.
According to the Prosecutor’s account, the now convicted man kept the woman locked in a room in his mother’s house for two days in October 2022, during which he hit her in the face and other parts of her body causing injuries, a situation that repeated later in April 2023. In the last hours of May 5 and the early hours of May 6 of that year, when both were in the apartment they shared, the man attacked her, first by beating her and then by suffocating her with his hands until death. “By acting as described, he also wanted the death of the fetus the woman was carrying in her womb,” the prosecution describes in a text fully accepted by the accused, who has been in provisional detention since May 17, 2023.
The couple, both 31 years old when the events occurred, had started a romantic relationship with cohabitation between September and October 2022 in Manresa, a relationship that was “always dominated by the contempt he felt towards his partner because of her condition as a woman,” the Prosecutor’s Office notes. He, “extremely jealous and controlling,” maintained strict control over everything his partner did, monitoring with whom she communicated through the phone and especially with the young woman’s previous boyfriend. In 2022, he even forbade her from spending Christmas with her family.
The judicial agreement to avoid the trial (the Prosecutor’s Office was requesting 32 years in prison) was reached with the private prosecution exercised by the family, with the popular prosecution subscribed by the Generalitat, and with the Prosecutor’s Office. The accused has accepted having to complete 63 days of community service, which he must perform in a penitentiary center.
