Cristian Dupuy, the father of Lucio Dupuy, called a rally in the courts of La Pampa this Thursday, when the sentence in the trial for
the murder and sexual abuse of the five-year-old boy
will be announced .
"This February 2, when I am in that room waiting for the verdict of the judges, I want to hear them outside,
that the request for justice be heard very loudly
. Because that day more than any other I will need the strength of all of you .. that day , it will be the day that I have to let him go...
That day the duel begins
, "Cristian wrote in a post on Facebook.
That day will be the closing of a trial that in its evidence and arguments stage took place between November 10 and December 22, 2022. The prosecution and the complaint that represents Christian agreed to the
request for life imprisonment
for the defendants of the crime,
the mother, Magdalena Espósito Valenti, and her girlfriend, Abigail Páez
.
The evidence that compromises them, the images from a neighbor's security camera, the chats, the time of death and the accusation
of a hate crime in the lawsuit
, are the
keys to a trial
that will be revealed with the sentence that will be handed down .
will read at 12 in the courtroom on the second floor of the judicial city of Santa Rosa.
Although both the Prosecutor's Office and the complaint consider that
the mother participated in the beating and abuse
on the afternoon of the crime, the defense of "Magui" Esposito (in charge of Pablo de Biasi) tried to remove her from the scene of the murder.
Lucio, with his injured arm, with his mother and the girlfriend.
The official defender Silvina Blanco deployed this strategy from the moment she spoke with the two women, at dawn in which they were arrested.
"I spoke with them and from what they said about the events,
I asked that they have two different defenders
," said defender Blanco the day after the crime, a few hours after the arrest of both women.
She assumed the defense of Páez.
At the trial, "Magui", the mother, stated that “when I left him at my house, he greeted me, he was alive.
To this day I still can't believe it."
And she added: “
We had a normal life
.
Lucio was a happy child and he was happy to be with me.
Both in his statement at the trial and in his final words, Espósito
pointed to the relationship with the Dupuy family
.
He said that he had already told Lucio that he was going to spend the summer of 2022 with his father, Christian.
"He had told me fine, but that
he wanted to talk to me every day to find out what we were doing
," her mother declared.
He also
refuted that he rejected motherhood
.
"Things were said that are not," she said.
He also talked about the father.
“I never had problems with Cristian beyond the fact that
he has physically, psychologically and financially violated me
.
I never hated him, nor did I have a problem with him, ”he said.
In that statement
he sought to blame the father
.
“When we ended our relationship I took it as the relationship had ended and nothing more.
What's more, I always demanded that he worry about his son and take care of his son, that he
fulfill his role as a father
, ”said Esposito.
the time of death
The last 19 minutes of Lucio's life are
recorded with images and reconstructed by the testimony
of the residents of the Río Atuel neighborhood who tried to revive the baby and who helped the stepmother to take him to the Evita Hospital.
There the doctor Hugo Argüello
certified the death at 9:45 p.m.
on Friday, November 26, 2021. An image from the security camera of a neighbor at Abigail Páez's house shows that she
left at 9:26 p.m. with Lucio in her arms
.
When he arrived at the hospital, Lucio Dupuy had already passed away.
The coroner determined that although the doctor Argüello certified the time of death, Lucio entered the Evita hospital “cold and wet”.
At zero hour, the staff of the Scientific Investigation Agency found that the corpse was rigid: it means
a period of death three hours before
.
Juan Carlos Toulouse, the photographer who performed the autopsy, determined that death occurred "between 8 and 9 pm."
"I never saw anything like it in my years as a coroner," he said in his trial statement.
When Abigail left with Lucio,
the baby was already dead
.
The maneuvers they performed on her caused contractions and convulsions in her body.
For this reason, according to prosecutors Verónica Ferrero, Walter Martos and Marcos Sacco,
the mother and the girlfriend participated in the beating and sexual abuse
on the afternoon of the day that Lucio was murdered.
Between 5:30 p.m. and 7:40 p.m., they physically assaulted him together.
They gave him blows, to the extremities and to the body, which caused multiple injuries: to the abdomen, thorax, back, face and skull.
In addition, she had a bruise on her back with a shoe print mark:
the sole of the shoe Abigail Páez was wearing on the night of the crime
.
The blows caused the accumulation of blood and fluid in the brain, the rupture of the liver and the bleeding that he had caused the accumulation of blood in the stomach area.
"These injuries caused his death, after an agony,"
prosecutors said, based on the autopsy carried out by Toulouse.
In the case, the most egregious piece of evidence is a
sex toy
(a vibrator) seized from the home of Páez and Espósito Valenti.
That element, according to the experts,
had DNA from both and from the baby
.
Based on the autopsy, the prosecutors affirm that "both sexually abused the child with carnal access on repeated occasions, using, among other things, as a means of committing sexual abuse, the introduction of a rubber-like phallic element (dildo) through the anus, as well as bite of his genitals, which produced
old and recent injuries
in the child ”.
He also had bite marks on his left arm.
hate crime
One of the elements that was debated in the trial was the request of the complaint that Lucio's murder be considered a
hate crime
.
They added this request to the classification of the fact, aggravated homicide and outrageous sexual abuse.
“
Lucio was killed for being a man
.
And we demonstrate it”, affirms Aguerrido.
He contributed 6,000 sheets with screenshots of the chats that Lucio's mother and his girlfriend had.
“They punished him, they left him in the rain and cold.
They tortured him,” added Aguerrido.
“This kid already looks like a strainer, open on all sides, this is being a (false) mother.
wey, abort!!!”,
Abigail expressed on social networks.
Lucio's relatives in a march they held on August 26 in the Capital, one year after his death.
Photo Rolando Andrade Stracuzzi
"A moment alone with Magui, we already need it," he published on August 22, 2021, marking his rejection of Lucio.
"Sometimes I would like to have a few days alone with Maga, do I ask so much?", she wrote on October 4, 2021.
Another message from October 15 says: "
Do not have children
if you really do not want it or do not plan it as a great goal or as the most important thing in your lives!!! Do not bring kids into the world to suffer the shell of their mother."
It was Mother's Day weekend and just over a month before the crime.
The sentence and after
With all this evidence, the hearing court made up of judges Daniel Saez Zamora and Andrés Olié and judge Alejandra Ongaro will issue a sentence this Thursday.
If they understand that they are guilty of the crimes they are accused of, the sentence that would fall on them would be
life imprisonment
.
This would close a first stage.
It is that the Dupuy family has already announced that it will sue the province of La Pampa before the United Nations Organization or the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for the
state breaches
that led to the death of the child.
His lawyer Aguerrido also anticipated that they will file a
criminal complaint against the employees of the Health area
who intervened in Lucio's care in the months prior to his death and that, despite the injuries and injuries he suffered, they did not activate a protocol to care for him. as a
case of child violence
.
The Pampa. Correspondent
ACE
look too
Lucio Dupuy's father called a mobilization for the day of the sentence: "Let the request for justice be heard loudly"
They found in Corrientes the 8-year-old boy who had disappeared a week ago in Córdoba
