Esteban Mikkelsen Jensen
12/15/2020 4:20 PM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 12/15/2020 4:26 PM
Melisa Noelia Casco was 19 years old.
Although she had not yet been trained for this task, she was in charge of caring for animals at the Florencio Varela Zoo.
On Tuesday April 10, 2007, around 5:00 p.m., she entered the cage of "Ramón", a giant anteater, alone, without safety clothing and without a handy or whistle, to feed him, when the animal attacked her and caused her very serious injuries that caused death.
The owners of the property not only did not take charge, but they
blamed him
: they said that he incurred an "excess of confidence" and "unduly exposed himself, without authorization from his employer."
Thirteen years later, the victim's family found some comfort amid the drama for an irreparable loss:
a labor court sentenced those responsible to pay them 101 million pesos.
The specimen was part of the Giant Anteater Conservation Project of that institution and Artis Zoo (a Dutch entity).
It was aggressive, weighed more than 50 kilos and measured more than two meters from snout to tail.
Melisa Casco was 19 and died when she was attacked by an anteater at the Florencio Varela zoo.
The victim died two days after the attack at the Evita Pueblo Hospital.
He had suffered serious injuries to his legs, arms, torso and abdomen
At that time, the biologist Cecilia Diminich, who worked for Florencio Varela's establishment for little more than a year, denounced that "
Ramón was aggressive and the zoo authorities knew it
."
Diminich (43) had had a couple of previous incidents with the same animal, which scratched his leg.
When she denounced what happened to her employers, "
they minimized it, and made jokes,
stating that the bear had surely attacked her because she was indisposed," according to the ruling, to which
Clarín
had access
.
The news of the death of the caretaker at the Florencio Varela Zoo, published by Clarín.
From then on, he decided that he would not enter the anteater cage again, so this task was left to Melisa Casco, who had started working in July 2005 as an "educational guide" and in January 2007 She became an animal caretaker, without having been trained.
"It is an exemplary and unprecedented ruling for the Province," said the lawyer for the Casco family, Fernando Burlando, who worked on the case together with his partner Alberto Couyoupetrou.
In addition, he said that "the full court explained the content of the sentence line by line."
In this regard, he argued that "these are the acts that give one hope" and that "it
is the first time that a court, in 12 years, gave an answer" to Melisa's parents
, Eduardo Alberto Casco (66), who suffers from chronic reactive depression due to the episode, and Marta Susana Lago (65).
Melisa Casco's father, when sentence was handed down, in 2014. Photo Emiliana Miguelez.
The zoo, which was located on Avenida López Escribano at 800, no longer exists.
It was closed in 2016. On April 14, 2014, its owner, Claudio Alejandro Quagliata (51) was sentenced to 3 years in suspended prison and 7 years of disqualification from being in any society related to zoos, for "culpable homicide" , as then determined by the Court in the Correctional Court No. 5 of Quilmes.
But eight months later the Court of Appeals in Criminal and Correctional Matters of Quilmes reversed the sentence and acquitted him.
In the recent ruling of the Labor Court No. 2 of La Plata, signed by judges Carlos Mariano Núñez, Juan Ignacio Orsini and Julio César Elorriaga, ordered Quagliata and the insurance company Federación Patronal to
pay more than 101 million pesos.
In addition, it rejected the lawsuit they had filed against the Municipality of Florencio Varela, which had granted the concession of the property to businessman Quagliata.
"
I believe that, with the evidence produced in the case, it was clearly established that the employer violated the duty of safety and incurred in negligent conduct causally linked to the accident that cost the life of the young Melisa Casco,
" explained Orsini in the resolution.
“
Consequently, it is fully demonstrated that
the employer incurred in a true concert of breaches of the safety regulations
, contempt that led her to disregard even the regulations that she herself had dictated, all of which demonstrates a serious negligence causally linked to death. of the worker: it is obvious and indisputable that if she had complied with these measures, the accident would have been avoided
”, he concluded.
EMJ
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