The deputy mayor of El Toro, a town of 248 inhabitants located in the region of Castellón, Alto Palancia, was firmly found guilty of a minor offense consisting of threatening a neighbor with whom he has strong coexistence conflicts. The second section of the Castelló Provincial Court, in a judgment of October 4 to which elDiario.es had access, confirmed the sentence of one month and 20 days of fine with a daily allowance of seven euros imposed on Vicente Tudón, deputy mayor of the PP, the party that has governed El Toro for more than two decades.
The proven facts section of the initial judgment of the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 1 of Segorbe reports that on March 7, neighbor Traian LT was threatened in a street in the town by the deputy mayor with expressions such as ” you have left hours, Romanian” or “you are going to die”. All this “in order to intimidate him”.
The PP advisor denied the facts during the oral trial held on March 27. Vicente Tudón stated that, on the day of the events, his neighbor placed a banner on the balcony “from where he laughed with mocking laughter”, threatened him and told him that he was going to “throw him out of the city.”
On the contrary, the sentence considers that it is not proven that Traian LT let out expressions to Vicente Tudón such as “I already gave it to your girlfriend, now it’s your turn” or that he makes the gesture of slitting his throat. The deputy mayor admitted that “he became very nervous” and threw “a lot of swear words at his neighbor that are not like him”.
Vicente Tudón also reported Traian LT for an alleged crime of minor threats. However, according to the judgment, Tudón’s statement “suffers from the requirement of persistence in incrimination.”
The threatened neighbor has already been convicted, for a minor offense of injury, in a sentence dated March 9, 2021. There were proven “disagreements” between the two neighbors, which is why the magistrate rejected the order of the ban requested by the defense of Traian LT (these are adjacent neighbors). “The acts reported were sufficiently punished by the sentence imposed,” specifies the judgment.
The first instance judgment considers that Traian LT presented at the trial the same version of events that he reported to the Civil Guard, “without ambiguities or contradictions”. In addition, his version was “peripherally corroborated” by the statement of his wife and by the recording that the man made with his cell phone in which the threatening expressions can be heard. “There is no doubt about the complainant’s incriminating version of the expression,” the judge said.
Vicente Tudón appealed his neighbor’s acquittal, alleging an alleged error in the evaluation of the evidence. However, the Provincial Court of Castelló rejected the appeal of the deputy mayor of El Toro and imposed costs on him, in a resolution against which there is no appeal.
While Traian LT’s version has “objective corroboration” from the video recorded with his cell phone, that of Vicente Tudón “has no objective corroboration,” the judgment concludes.
The mayor defends his “number two”
The city’s mayor, the popular José Arenes, rejects the condemned man’s resignation and places the events in a confrontation with a neighbor who “makes his life impossible.” “They accumulated complaints well before these events,” said the first mayor during a telephone interview with this newspaper. The mayor of El Toro also alludes to a previous attack by Traian LT against the wife of Vicente Tudón, for which he was convicted.
Furthermore, Arenes claims that “the events occurred when he was neither deputy mayor nor municipal councilor.” The sentence indicates that the threats were made on March 7.
