“Alejandro is not guilty of planning the robbery at his mother’s house.” With this sentence, the popular jury that has been following since last December 5 the trial for attempted robbery and brutal murder of a 61-year-old woman, Maravillas, which shocked the region of Murcia on September 10, 2023, put an end to what the accused himself defined as the worst two years of his life. The members of the jury did not find, during the four hearings of the trial, any clear evidence that the victim’s son agreed with his murderer and had developed a plan to burglarize his own house, as pointed out by the prosecutor, who requested a three-year prison sentence against him for the crime of attempted robbery with violence. The acquittal of Alejandro, who spent two months in temporary prison after the crime, became effective immediately after the verdict was read on Tuesday evening.
Deciding whether or not the young man, now 21, had planned the robbery that ended in death was the central question of this trial, since the perpetrator of the murder was clear from the first moment. The accused Bryan, who was 29 years old when he committed the crime, admitted the facts in his statement before the Murcia Provincial Court, which led the prosecutor to reduce the requested sentence from 28 to 21 years in prison. Before this recognition, there was also no doubt about his paternity, since the brutal beatings he inflicted on Maravillas until he ended his life were entirely recorded by a video surveillance camera that was in the house and which recorded audio and video.
Since Bryan, who had a close friendship with the victim’s son, was arrested, he said it was the latter who suggested committing the theft. The reason: Maravillas withheld the money his son had received as an inheritance and did not let it spend as he pleased.
On the day the crime was committed, Bryan and Alejandro spoke on the phone for over an hour. According to the first, to establish the details of how he would carry out the theft. According to the second, they discussed the holidays and arranged to meet at the fair. “Now I see that he got information from me. I was stupid and now my mother is no longer with me,” he said in his statement to the judge.
For the prosecutor, one of the pieces of evidence that would demonstrate that the son knew that the theft was going to take place is that, spontaneously and without being asked, he explained to the police officer who was guarding him on the day of the crime, that it was possible that his friend had tried to enter the house because he himself had told him on several occasions that he kept a lot of money at home. “I didn’t want anything to happen to my mother,” he even told the agent, which caught his attention, since Alejandro was still unaware that she had died.
For his lawyer, Evaristo Llanos, a famous criminal lawyer from Murcia, this conversation only shows that little by little, the young man “realized” what had happened. Another of the main reasons why the lawyer defended that the attacker did not count on the victim’s son is the fact that he did not have the slightest idea where the money could be: he searched the entire house, even in the false ceilings of the bathrooms, without finding any loot.
The prosecutor also relied on one of the sentences spoken by Bryan to the victim during the attack. The lawyer asked the jury to view the security camera recording at that time to hear the full sentence: “Your son opened his mouth when we were having dinner with friends and I can tell you he said you had 20 or 30,000 euros and that’s what he sent me for,” he is heard saying. For the lawyer, what was said was “they sent me”, in the plural, a crucial nuance, because he was referring to third parties and not to Alejandro. During the attack, Bryan repeatedly referred to these so-called third parties: “They have Alejandro”, “They have my sister and I’m very afraid”, “They are following your son”, “They threatened me”, he repeats constantly during the attack to persuade the victim to give him the money.
Due to the brutality of the beating, the jury saw only five fragments of the recording, each lasting about 15 seconds. To avoid the entire viewing, the head of the National Police homicide unit who led the investigation gave a lengthy description of the tape, one of the hardest moments of the trial, as well as the viewings mentioned above.
Although he had headed the unit for more than a decade, the police officer said in his statement that he felt shocked when he saw the crime scene due to the large number of injuries that the body of the deceased presented at first glance. When he had access to the video, the impact was even greater, despite his vast experience. “These are very complicated images to see. The whole scene was recorded and you can see all the agony, the images are upsetting,” he said.
In light of this evidence, the jury considered that Bryan killed Maravillas “by treason”, with the aim of being able to commit the robbery and not be betrayed, since, as also shown in the recordings, she recognized him and addressed him by name on numerous occasions to beg him to stop. They also corroborated the aggravating circumstance of the disguise, since the man was completely covered.
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