Death at the landfill: crime or misfortune?

Misfortune or crime.

The death of the two cousins ​​from Madrid, Fernando Fernández García, 17, and Ángel Fernández Silva, 11, whose remains were found, almost a month apart from each other, at the Ecoparque de Toledo urban waste dump , has unleashed a conglomerate of lucubrations that threatens harmony between gypsy families.

One question remains unanswered: why did the bodies of the children end up at the garbage plant in the Castilian-La Mancha capital?

The minors lost track of them on December 10, when they were leaving a supermarket belonging to the Híper Usera chain, on General Ricardos street, in the Madrid neighborhood of Carabanchel.

That afternoon, the boys told their parents that they were going to buy something to eat, and they never came back.

The cameras in the area, later reviewed by the police, show their journey, which begins in the corridors of the Marqués de Vadillo metro station.

Later, his image is registered at the Madrid bus station and, around 7:00 p.m., at Toledo.

The recordings later capture them at the Zentral hotel in the latter city —from which they enter and leave—, and, later, they are seen walking through the center on a cold and rainy night, according to police sources.

So far what can be seen in the cameras.

More information

DNA confirms that the remains found in the Toledo landfill belong to the other missing minor in Madrid

Initially, the police considered that behind the disappearance and death of the boys there could be "a mess of skirts between gypsy families."

Now, he maintains as the main hypothesis, and "in the absence of other evidence", that the minors could get into a garbage container on the street to take shelter and that a collection truck would later take them away, causing a fatal accident.

To the parents, who at first defended the police investigation, although they denied “trouble between relatives”, this explanation seems completely implausible.

According to them, the kids were "accustomed to the street" coming from "a family of junk dealers", and they believe that "someone took them and killed them, or left them unconscious in a container".

On December 21, it was learned that, six days earlier, on the 15th, an operator at the Ecoparque de Toledo landfill had found a human body on the garbage distribution belt.

However, no one connected the dots until that day.

“In Madrid they were looking for two children who had disappeared since the 10th and in Toledo they found the body of a boy in a garbage dump.

But no one realized that it was the same issue: there was a clear police lack of coordination," denounces Juan José Cortés, evangelical pastor and father of little Mari Luz, the five-year-old girl murdered in Huelva in 2008 by a neighbor from the neighborhood.

From his personal experience, Cortés has acted as a mediator between the families in this case of the children of Carabanchel, a matter that becomes cloudy as the weeks have passed.

The preliminary autopsy determined that Fernando died of suffocation.

“But, in the absence of a definitive forensic study, it is not yet known what type of suffocation, whether he died from crushing, poisoning or drowning, nor whether he died before or after reaching the container.

There are many unknowns and the investigation must clarify them to conclude that it was an accident, if that is the case”, warns Cortés.

On January 11, landfill operators found a limb of little Ángel, and on Saturday they found his torso and other limbs in the waste plant, with a capacity for 250,000 tons of garbage from the entire province of Toledo.

View of the Toledo landfill.AngelesG.Visdomine (EFE)

Marriages and separations

"The boys went to Toledo to see the one who was Fernando's wife," explains Carlos García Barrett, the private detective hired by the family of the deceased minors, desperate to find answers to their deaths.

The 17-year-old girl married Fernando when they were both teenagers and left him some time later, "due to disagreements with his family, with whom he had gone to live in Madrid," says the researcher, recently appointed spokesperson. familiar.

"Later, she married another young gypsy from Galicia, whom she left for two months before recently returning to Toledo to live with her father."

Her relatives say that the two ex-husbands were still in love with her.

The second "went to throw himself out of a window in rage and was left in a wheelchair," these sources say.

That fateful December 10 in which the minors lose track, Fernando's ex-wife was indeed in Toledo, but at her mother's house, in a block of occupied flats in a popular neighborhood of the Castilian-La Mancha capital.

"The girl was actually living with her father, but he had left her there for a couple of days," her relatives say.

The parents' marriage had also broken up years ago and they were separated.

The girl, questioned by the police, said that she never got to see Fernando that day.

She also assured the parents of the two deceased, who showed up at her mother's house the night the kids disappeared, suspecting that they had gone looking for the young woman.

Two days later, several relatives of the girl's second husband beat him up at her mother's house,

as she has recounted.

Her mother also painted the house again, according to her because Christmas was coming, but that has only increased the suspicions of Fernando and Ángel's family that something strange could have happened there.

"We have requested that a secret room be opened so that protected witnesses can testify while preserving their identity," says lawyer Marcos García Montes, who now represents the families of the deceased minors.

Among them, he points to five neighbors and relatives of Fernando's ex-wife, "witnesses of mistreatment, an alleged kidnapping of minors and several changes of address," he points out.

The judge handling the case has not yet ruled on that request.

"It is necessary that all the blind spots of this investigation be clarified and that even the painters be called to testify," says the lawyer.

The police investigation remains open, after the scientific police have inspected that apartment in Toledo up to two times, while all kinds of speculation is fueled in the gypsy gossip.