On April 12, 2021, Micaela Rascovsky was 25 years old. That day he sent photos to his mother Patricia Ortiz (now 45) of his body full of bruises and a plate of cocaine that was in the living room of the apartment he shared with his partner, Guido Pascuccio (now 38). "I want his parents to help him get off drugs and then I separate mom. But in case something happens to me, I sent these same photos to two friends as well." Thus, Patricia remembers the last message she received from her daughter. Within hours Micaela passed away.
This week a documentary was released in Spain that tells the case and argues that Micaela did not commit suicide, but that the boyfriend killed her. "Guido said that she committed suicide and I don't understand why Justice believed that," Patricia told Clarín.
The autopsy showed that the young woman had multiple injuries, recent and old, but that they were not of sufficient entity to kill her. The cause concluded that the victim died of "dilated heart disease, congestion and pulmonary edema" after convulsing from the consumption during that morning of cocaine, alcohol and citalopram (an antidepressant medication).
In turn, for the prosecutor of the case, Patricio Lugones, in charge of the National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor's Office No. 28, the accused "savagely whipped" her the morning she died and three days before, with the aggravating circumstance that he let her die and did not call emergencies. That is the key point. He was the only one who could help her.
Despite the autopsy and toxicology examination, the family is suspicious of the cause of death. "Following the analysis of a Spanish expert we believe that he died of mechanical asphyxiation and we want Justice to review that," explains Patricia.
Both Patricia and her husband Sebastián Rascovsky (47) question that the accused is not prosecuted for femicide, but for minor injuries doubly aggravated in real competition with abandonment of person, aggravated by the death of the victim. This change of qualification was decided by Chamber VII of the National Court of Appeals in Criminal and Correctional Matters.
The modification impacts on the reduction of the penalty in expectation. It would have been life imprisonment, and now, at most, it is 15 years for abandonment followed by death plus minor injuries. This setback for Micaela's family is added to the fact that after a year and a half detained with preventive detention Pascuccio was released with "a bail of 3 million pesos."
Women demand justice for Micaela Rascovsky in front of Congress.
"I am sure that Mica was the victim of a femicide committed by Guido and another man, because she had traces of defense and DNA under the fingernails of two men. Guido was identified and the other is a NN, but it was not investigated who he was," he says. Now the family is waiting for the conformation of the Oral Court No. 10 that will carry out the trial to be defined.
The year in which the young woman died, 59% of femicides were committed by partners and ex-partners of the victims, and 55% of femicides occurred in the victim's home, according to the Observatory "Ahora Que Sí Nos Ven". The trend is repeated annually.
Despite the pain, Patricia and Sebastian continue to fight for justice for Micaela: "I don't know how we stand. Mica holds us so we don't fall, we swear to do justice for her. At the same time that April 13 we died with her. Every day we wait for the reunion with our daughter, the great love of our lives."
Gender-based violence
The then couple had met in 2018 at a party at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), where she was studying and he attended with friends. "They dated for a while, but Mica didn't get things out of him. He was already a lawyer, he had been there for 11 years and he continued with a lot of nightlife. Then my daughter stepped aside," says Patricia.
Although they distanced themselves, in 2020 they resumed contact. Micaela studied, worked at a car dealership and lived alone in Pilar. She took advantage of weekends to spend them with her family – she was an only child – and her friends in Escobar, where she was from. But everything changed when Guido reappeared.
"He told her he had quit drugs, that he had changed and Mica believed him. Over the months, he began to rush her to move into his apartment in Villa Ortúzar. I told him to get engaged or I was going to cut him. And she moved in November 2020," says the girl's mother. Only the following month, Patricia and her husband met Guido and Micaela announced her pregnancy.
The couple was happy, but after a month and a half they lost the pregnancy. It was the second time that situation had happened to Micaela. That led her to take antidepressants. In addition, she could suffer from cancer because she had a molar pregnancy and her mother was waiting for a kidney transplant. Micaela became more and more isolated. "Guido began to hate her because of the loss of the baby. He reproached him," Patricia explains.
But not only psychological violence reigned in the home but also economic and physical. "During the pregnancy, she did not work and when Guido lost it, he forced her to take out a loan to cover her maintenance." Therefore, Micaela did not want to leave his house until he resolved that debt of $ 300,000, since he gave it in "loan to the father of the groom, Rubén (73)", according to the fiscal requirement of elevation to trial.
Three months after losing the pregnancy and two days before the death of the young woman, the defendant called Patricia to tell her that he had argued with Micaela and that he had left. "I had to slap her because I couldn't control her," he told me over the phone. Patricia called her daughter and confirmed what she feared: "Micaela told me that he slapped her three times and beat her because he was never going to give up drugs."
Micaela Rascovsky, wanted to separate from her partner.
Although her mother wanted to look for her, she told her that she was going back to the apartment because she wanted to help Guido. That's why she decided to talk to his father about his addiction.
The woman doesn't blame drugs for the fateful night her daughter passed away. "What happened is the fault of his perverse and psychopathic personality. But he used the drug as an excuse. Guido made her believe that everything that happened to her was because of her addiction," explains the victim's mother.
After Micaela's death, her parents learned more about Guido's life. "They gave us two disks from my daughter and his cell phones and computers. Guido was talking to 27 friends who sold drugs to each other. They also said 'when the girl is on, let the group fall and we do everything'. They were talking about a 13-year-old girl," says Patricia.
He adds: "They transmitted between them when they had sex with a girl. We denounced in the Federal Justice what we learned thanks to the chats."
The court case
In June 2021, the Justice raided Guido's home and arrested him. Magistrate Manuel J. Gorostiaga, head of Criminal and Correctional Court No. 2, prosecuted him for femicide. He was imprisoned for a year and a half, and the day after his release, in February of this year, the judge confirmed the elevation to trial with the imputation of Guido as the author of minor injuries doubly aggravated in real contest with abandonment of person, aggravated by the death of the victim.
Judicial sources in the case explain to Clarín that it was an investigation that was carried out thoroughly and that allowed "to verify the responsibility of the lawyer in the death of his girlfriend."
"Guido deliberately chose not to act in the face of Micaela's episode of seizures. He chose to do nothing, waiting for him to die," the prosecutor's request for elevation to trial reads.
In another passage, Lugones expresses: "Once he died, he placed the body on the floor with his back resting on the living room chair, articulated his limbs so that the most recent injuries to death could not be seen, and those of old date (of Saturday 10), he covered them with a sheet that he placed above Micaela's body. Then, he called the police, but not the SAME. She called the police because she was already dead." And he adds that the accused in his inquiry "denied having seen the injuries that Micaela had." Something impossible.
The lack of help from the accused was shown by not communicating with emergencies and because the victim had no "signs of cardiopulmonary resuscitation" (CPR). For the prosecution that determined his responsibility. At the same time, it takes into account the situation of vulnerability of the young woman who could not fend for herself because of the mixture she ingested.
"Guido Pascuccio chose to see her die to prevent her from denouncing him for gender violence. (...) He took advantage of the episode of convulsion, to wait for him to die and avoid the judicial consequences that Micaela had already announced he was going to have to face for the numerous blows he made, "attacks the fiscal requirement.
Another key that shows that Micaela did not commit suicide that morning is that she looked for studios to move in on her computer until 4.09. But at 4.36 a.m. the accused looked at her cell phone – he recognized it – and only at 4.48 a.m. did he summon the police. That half hour it took to call the authorities is questioned by both the prosecutor and the family.
"The instruction of the summary has allowed to demonstrate that Micaela Rascovsky was a victim of gender violence by her cohabiting partner Guido Pascuccio," says Lugones.
Throughout the investigation they collected testimonies from co-workers of the victim, psychologists and psychiatrists of Micaela, and neighbors who reported the aggressions they heard coming from the couple's apartment. Added to the chats of her with close people and the perpetrator, and the autopsy.
Likewise, the person in charge of the building where they lived notified the Justice that the accused after the fact, asked him if the cameras of the building worked, to which he replied that "they had not worked for four or five years."
Although a "farewell letter" written by the young woman appeared, which had no date, the Justice does not believe that she wrote it the morning she died. Her mother estimates that it is from when she was told she could have cancer.
For the mother of the victim, the contradictions of the accused led him to be arrested. "He said that he was sleeping that morning and woke up because of Micaela's convulsions, but from 1.30 he spoke on his cell phone with his mother and brother," says Patricia.
The prosecutor's request also states that at 2 o'clock the accused and the victim spoke on a cell phone, showing that he was awake and she had not returned to the apartment. For prosecutor Lugones, when he arrived "he whipped her."
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