The man accused of attempting to murder his wife and two daughters, aged 6 and 14, causing a serious traffic accident on the N-432 in Alcaracejos in September 2019, denied this Friday before the court of the Third Section of the Provincial Court of Córdoba. to force them into the car and threatened to kill themdescribing that it was all due to a fortuitous accident because they were in a heated argument and he swerved to the left to avoid veering off to the right side.
The woman who testified in court with a screen so she could not see the defendant – although she had dropped the charges against him – subscribed to this defense theory, even though the prosecutor pointed out that the victim after leaving intensive care unit Due to the serious injuries caused by the accident, which left scars on one leg, he informed the hospital social worker and then the Civil Guard officers who took his statement. he wanted to kill them and that it was all intentional.
“I didn’t feel well that day, it was my fault if I was screaming in the car, I wasn’t well, I had depression and a lot of nerves; “He said we committed suicide, we committed suicide because he drove off the road,” the victim testified in court.
The trial began this Friday with the presentation in the preliminary questions section of the defense of nullity of the victim’s first statement understanding that the officers did not read her her right not to testify against her husband or to remain silent. The prosecution objected to this and the presiding judge agreed that he would resolve this issue in the sentencing itself and that the trial should begin.
The representative of the public prosecutor defended at the time the holding of the hearing, recalling that the victim’s statement before the agents and the investigating judge was valid and that the duty of the Civil Guard – questioned by the defense – is to appear at the hospital for check these crimes attempted homicide reported by the social worker to whom the victim recounted the events upon leaving the intensive care unit.
The accused, for whom the prosecution is requesting a sentence of 29 years in prison by three crimes of attempted homicide In addition to other road safety offences, he refused to answer questions from the prosecution during the hearing and only answered questions from his lawyer.
The defendant said that a few days before the accident, his wife had tried to self-lyse herself and he had taken her to the hospital. That night, around 3 a.m., he arrived home while his daughters were sleeping and found the woman nervous and told her In the middle of an argument, he wanted to go to his mother’s house in Hinojosa. And before his wife’s insistence and amid the screams that woke the girls, he decided to take them despite the fact that he had ingested a large amount of alcohol, “several beers, seven or eight cubes and cocaine.” “I told them Let’s all go to Hinojosa “But I didn’t force them into the car, we were both shouting and insulting each other,” the accused told the court.
“We kept arguing and yelling in the car and I wasn’t running very fast – even though I didn’t have a driving license“And nine or ten kilometers from Pozoblanco, I saw that the car was going to the right and I said that we were going to kill each other and I went to the left and that’s when it fell,” he told the audience.
When he got out of the car, he answered his lawyer’s questions: “I had a bone in my hip but I was able to grab my little girl and get her out of the car, but not the others who were stuck in the back seat and had to be released by the firefighters. “I didn’t say I was going to kill you, but that we would kill each other, that we would take the girls,” he repeated again in the room.
Abuse for years
For his part, the Civil Guard agent who took the victim’s statement at the hospital said: declared by videoconference that the woman was very afraid to leave in writing the statements she had made to them verbally that he had caused the accident and that she had been suffering abuse for years because there were relatives of her husband in the hospital.
As for how the accident could have happened, the agent of the Civil Guard’s traffic sub-sector in charge of the report stated that the vehicle was heading to the right after a straight to a curvethe first of this section, and when he saw that he was going to leave, he turned left. In these cases, the normal instinct is to brake but there were no marks on the asphalt due to braking but to the friction of the wheel due to the steering. The traffic officer clarified that “the first reflex of someone is to brake when they realize that they are going to exit to the right and in his case, what he does is that a left steering wheel which causes several turns of the barrel (bell) and remains in the final position.
Questioned by the prosecutor, the agent admitted that he did not have measures to determine the exact speed towards which they were heading but that it was insufficient and that it was not a closed turn, although he also pointed out that if he had been distracted he could have gone off.
