A year ago, hand in hand, they jumped into the void.
Alana and Leila, the twins who were born in Mar del Plata and lived in the Catalan town of Sallent, 74 kilometers from Barcelona, pulled two chairs up to the balcony railing and jumped down.
It was three in the afternoon on February 21 of last year and they had returned from school.
They were 12 years old.
Alana did not survive the fall from the third floor where they lived.
Leila, yes.
The blow caused fractures in his arms, jaw and damaged a lung.
He underwent several operations,
months of hospitalization and rehabilitation
in different specialized centers in Catalonia.
As soon as the doctors gave her permission to travel, Leila, her parents and Amadeo, her younger brother,
returned to Argentina
.
They have been with their loved ones, in Mar del Plata, since mid-January.
And although the original plan was to return to Spain,
Leila and Amadeo do not want to separate from their family again.
The decision not to continue
“
I want to be happy, but obviously I am going to suffer from this for the rest of my life and I made the decision not to continue
,” Alana wrote.
“You know how much I love my sister, I
saw all the
bullying
she suffers
, I'm going to do what she decides.
“I am going to accompany her wherever she wants,” Leila wrote.
The case occurred in Sallent, a town in Catalonia.
Photo @TribunaLibreES
The girls were in the first year of ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education) of the Spanish educational system.
According to the school, the Llobregat Public Institute, they did not suffer harassment.
However, Aitana, a student at the school and friend of the twins, said otherwise.
“What did they tell you?
'You sudacas'
and they laughed at his accent,” she noted.
Other classmates also said that when Alana defended herself from the attacks she was punished.
They left her
in a cold classroom
that everyone knew as “la fridge” (“the refrigerator”).
Weeks before jumping into the void, Alana had cut her hair and had confided to her closest friends that she wanted to be called Ivan, a wish that fueled the bonfire of ridicule and insults at school.
The school denied the harassment
The Department of Education of the Generalitat of Catalonia and the public school where the twins attended classes denied that the Argentine girls were suffering from bullying, because there were no records of any procedure being processed in this regard.
“This is a complex social case.
All protocols were activated and, from the information we have,
bullying had not been detected
.
Therefore, we cannot say that it existed,” the mayor of Sallent, Oriol Ribalta, told
Clarín
, 48 hours after the girls jumped into the void.
Clarín
contacted the mayor of Sallent again.
But this time he didn't want to answer the call.
“It is a collective failure”
“A tragic event like this is a collective failure as a society,” the president of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, told
Clarín
, three weeks after the tragedy.
And
he admitted that the girls would have suffered the harassment
that the school initially denied.
“A judicial investigation is underway and we are going to provide all the data so that we can have all the information and we can know all the explanations that are absolutely necessary,” the Catalan president told Clarín
in
March of last year.
A classmate of Leila claimed that the teenager was bullied at school.
@TribunaLibreES
“Because two teenagers have tried to take their own lives, and in the case of one of them this suicide has finally been committed,
as a society it is a collective failure
.
But we have to investigate all the causes, which are complex, as in all cases of suicides among young people,” Aragonès added.
For five months, the Investigative Court number 5 of Manresa has had the reports that the Mossos d'Esquadra, the Catalan regional police, gave it in the investigation of the case of the Sallent twins.
It also has the seven different reports that the Department of Education prepared about what happened.
As Clarín
learned
, the lawsuit that Lucas and Maia, the twins' parents, are pursuing is at risk of being filed.
“The last thing I know is that, according to the school, calling a girl 'shitty sudaca' is not bullying,”
José Manuel López, father of Kira, the 15-year-old teenager who one morning in May 2021,
told
Clarín
. He said goodbye to go to school and, when he got into the elevator at home, he went up to the terrace and jumped into the void.
Posters requesting Justice for the two Argentine twins.
Desperate because of the suffering that it was for her to endure bullying in class, she preferred not to continue living.
“It's disgusting that they say that saying 'scary sweat' is not harassment.
That is a hate crime but it seems that it doesn't matter among children,” adds José Manuel, who asks Pedro Sánchez's government for a school bullying law.
“A child who commits suicide does not want to die, what he wants is to stop suffering,” he says in his petition through the Change.org platform, where he has already gathered
260 thousand signatures
.
Kira's story, and that of other boys who cut short their own lives so as not to suffer more insults and ridicule among their peers, are told in
Dolor impune
, a documentary that had ten nominations for this year's Goya Awards.
Harassment cases tripled
In Sallent, the educational authorities relieved the management of the school where Alana and Leila attended and expanded integration programs and group dynamics to more classes at the school.
In the two months after the tragedy of the Argentine twins,
bullying reports tripled.
And on May 19 of last year, another pair of twins,
Aleksandra and Anastasiia
, also 12 years old, threw themselves out of a window on the sixth floor where they lived in Oviedo.
They did not survive.
On March 7, only Leila will turn 14. “The day I see you again, I'm going to tell you how difficult life was without you.
Alana forever,” says the WhatsApp status of her grandfather Gustavo's cell phone.
Madrid. Correspondent
MG