“I must clarify why I am so afraid of Dámaso, he doesn’t care who he drags into it, he even prefers to harm himself just to hurt me, to ruin my life, as he literally said at the time and was proven in previous trials.” This is part of Laura Cruz’s statement in the last complaint she filed against Dámaso Fernández, although it terrified her: “Reporting these events causes me panic, I can’t rest, I lose the desire to leave the house, to get out of bed, crying constantly because I really don’t know what is better for my children and me, to accept his control and pressure so he doesn’t do anything to us or to report him. I know this complaint will anger him without being able to foresee the consequences, but I find no other legal way to defend myself against the psychological harm he exerts on me by all means, now through patrimonial and economic control, harming me and again my children.”
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Laura went to file that complaint on August 5, 2025, at 11:47 in the morning. A year later, on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, shortly before 1:30 p.m., he murdered her. He violated the restraining order, traveled from Zamora, where he lived, to Llanes, where she lived. He sneaked in through a back door at the Civil Guard barracks; there both, agents of the Armed Institute, had formed a family many years before. Then he stole a weapon from a colleague, searched for her, and shot her. No one could do anything against that sudden attack and he ended up shot by Laura’s colleagues, who tried to stop him from shooting them as well and to prevent his escape. She had been thinking for years that he would not stop until he destroyed her. She had spent more than a decade looking for ways to escape the control he tried to impose on her.
A mortgage as a weapon to exert economic violence
In 2014 Dámaso and Laura separated. They had never married, but by then they had a six-year-old son and two twins aged two who will soon turn 19 and 14. They had signed a mortgage that ended up being his last and most persistent tool to force her to maintain a bond, to exert continuous economic violence against Laura and her children. “I understand that Dámaso’s only goal is moral and psychological harm in order to break me down and destroy me morally,” she also said in that complaint last summer.
She was already carrying years of violence, but also, despite everything, “resistance”; it is the word used by several people who have known this case over time. She had endured that, after the separation, he began a cascade of complaints against her: 45 over the years for reasons that, according to judicial documentation, Dámaso filed simply “to mess with her.”
He never paid for his children’s extracurricular expenses until the court forced him. Two months after that happened, in 2019, he hit her with “extreme violence” in front of their children and four other witnesses at the barracks; the judicial process after the complaint for that beating was long and complex, extending until July 15 of last year, when he was convicted of gender violence, coercion, and a minor injury offense.
The mortgage was the reason she went back to the barracks on August 5, 2025. She explained to the agents that since 2016 that apartment had been used by him to hurt her and her children and keep her under control. Or at least try to. She had dragged years of trying to reach an agreement to settle that debt and, when last year he seemed to agree to a pact, Laura made an “important economic effort” in which she also needed her family.
She did it, as she told the agents, thinking that eliminating any connection with her ex-partner compensated her children: “We make the effort for them, not only economically but psychologically.” She also told them that her daughters and son had already “suffered enough with the situation” so that they also couldn’t have a life of studies and trips which was, “normal,” “what they deserve.”
But after all those efforts, he refused to sign the last necessary documents. “He only acted in bad faith to make us all work at his whim while he laughs at everyone, with that power of control he believes he has over my time and person,” Laura deepened in the complaint.
The coercion
Dámaso, it reads in the police report, began “to deny what happened with lies, even having left written proof” that he accepted the deal and that “even on two occasions by phone, Tuesday 07/15 at 14:29 and Wednesday 07/16/2025 at 11:26” a bank employee called Laura to tell her that Dámaso had said he would sign if she withdrew the complaint.
Laura referred to that pressure to withdraw a criminal complaint that was judicialized and with a sentence “even knowing it is not possible” as “coercion.” She also reminded the agents that, among the crimes for which he had been convicted, were those same coercions, and that it was a behavior that continued.
Also that he had broken the restraining measures in force at that time by having communicated to the bank employee that condition to sign the agreement: “His intention is to send me a message to unsettle me, manipulate me and ultimately continue psychologically abusing me, and he has undoubtedly succeeded; my mental state has worsened.”
What Dámaso was doing implied for her a show of power: “He reminds me that he commands and is there, to manipulate me and hurt me, and he succeeds. I am very bad, I do nothing but cry, having to go to the Llanes Health Center urgently, believing it to be a one-time anxiety episode due to the situation. However, as the medical report shows, it is a generalized anxiety disorder.”
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She, who was the Civil Guard representative in the technical commissions on gender violence in Llanes ―the periodic meetings of professionals from all resources working in that field to analyze the most serious cases or issues that may concern them―, stopped being so after the beating Dámaso gave her in 2019. “She left and said she didn’t want to, that she couldn’t continue participating,” says a professional from that area. In the complaint, Laura stated that from that moment she was “even more afraid” of him.
“I am so afraid of what he might do to me and my children that I even requested a job change to adjust to the minors’ schedule and thus continue accompanying them in all their activities and sports events, since they only gave me an electronic device [the anti-abuser bracelet she wore for a time]. I must be physically with them in case there is an attempt to approach,” she explained to the agents.
“He has always wanted to maintain psychological control”
Laura did not take sick leave, she told them, because working helped her forget everything. “And to set an example for my children that, despite the difficulties life puts in your way, you have to keep going. That there is no better help than getting up day by day for them, even though my mood and emotional state are like this because of him [Dámaso], because he doesn’t stop. I thought that with time and the sentences he had calmed down, but apparently not, he continues trying to maintain that emotional power over me: ‘You do what I want and how I want.’”
Then she delved into how the mechanisms of violence against her worked: “It is psychological and vicarious violence. His children continue with a mother with a mortgage she cannot get out of if he does not sign. If he does not accept, I will never be able to leave as a bank defaulter, no one will give me a loan to pay for studies or help my children, nor to buy a house. He has always wanted to maintain his presence, his pressure and psychological control over me.”
And she gave several examples of how Dámaso ―as male aggressors usually do― tried to intimidate or unsettle her every time something happened like court hearings, a sentence, or banking issues. Then he, “curiously,” usually lost the coverage of the restraining electronic device: “Keeping me tense and reminding me that he is still there to mess up my life as he said he was going to do.”
She requested, once the order for which she had been granted the anti-abuser bracelet expired, that it be reactivated. That the measures be active again. But on December 19 of last year, the civil and instruction section of the first instance court of Llanes denied her those measures.
“An objective risk situation” that was not perceived
At that time, the justice system considered that there was no “objective risk situation” nor “factors or indicators of event or incidence that make it foreseeable that the investigated person will carry out future behavior tending to undermine the physical or psychological integrity of the victim,” it reads in the order.
And despite Laura’s account explaining that every time something happened, he tried again to destabilize her, no one seemed to think that one of those “factors or indicators of event or incidence” could be the notification of expulsion from the Civil Guard that Dámaso received just a few days ago. One of the phrases collected in that complaint by Laura on August 5, 2025, which was dismissed in April, was this: “I just want him to let me live my life in peace, my children and me.”
So far this year, 36 women have been murdered by their partners or ex-partners. Since the official statistics began in 2003, there have been 1,377 women. And the number of minors orphaned this year due to this violence has already risen to 26, 536 since they have been recorded, starting in 2013. Laura’s eldest son, already 18, is not included in that statistic, nor is any adult since there are data, although for them the situation is the same regardless of their age.
The phone number 016 serves victims of gender violence, their families, and their environment 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 different languages. The number is not recorded on the phone bill, but the call must be deleted from the device. Contact can also be made via email 016-online@igualdad.gob.es and WhatsApp at 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation phone 900 20 20 10. In an emergency, call 112 or the National Police (091) and Civil Guard (062) numbers. If calling is not possible, the ALERTCOPS app can be used, which sends an alert signal to the police with geolocation.
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