One year after the double femicide of Cristina and Ada Iglesias, the family awaits the start of the oral trial

Cristina Beatriz Iglesias (40) and Ada Antonia Iglesias (7) were two of the almost 300 victims of femicide that were registered throughout the country in 2020, according to a report by the Femicide Observatory of the Ombudsman's Office. Town of the Nation. The relatives of the victims are waiting for the Justice to set a date for the start of the trial for Abel Alejandro Romero (26).

"Giving him a life sentence is not enough for me. We are waiting for justice to be done. It does not occur to me to forgive him. With my family we are a little better, a year has passed. For me it is a relief to stop counting the months to start counting the years," said Fernando Iglesias, brother and uncle of the victims, who asked the Oral Criminal Court 2 of the Lomas de Zamora Judicial Department to order the debate to begin.

Iglesias affirmed that her sister had known her boyfriend "for a short time" and that the Social, Preventive and Obligatory Isolation (ASPO) "played a trick on them because, as she supported him and the man had nowhere to go , stayed to live with her and my niece".

"The relationship was normal, she looked good, in love, happy. That bothers me because I didn't see anything strange or that caught my attention," recalled Fernando, who added that Romero "was quiet."

"We never expected something like this to happen. Dolores (Cristina's other daughter) knew him a little better and there was nothing to suggest that he was capable of murdering them," he said.

One year after the double femicide, Fernando denounced that his niece Dolores received telephone threats in the last week in which they told her "take care, you know who I am, be careful what you say."

On the other hand, the women's handball teams from Lanús and Vélez Sarsfield, where Dolores plays and Fernando directs, carried out a campaign to remember the two women.

"There were people who have helped us a lot but we are destroyed, there is nothing to mitigate this that we don't see them anymore. Falling for that is screwed, more than anything that doesn't have an explanation", Fernando concluded.

Romero, who remains housed in the Florencio Varela Prison, is accused of the crime of "double homicide aggravated by treachery and by the bond mediating gender violence", to the detriment of whoever was his partner and her youngest daughter, for which he could receive a life sentence.

Double femicide

The double femicide was discovered on March 27, 2020 in a house on Domingo Punta 4064 street in the town of Monte Chingolo, Lanús district, in the south of the Buenos Aires suburbs.

For the clarification, the work carried out by the Canes Division of the Secretary of Security of the Buenos Aires municipality of Escobar, whose dog Bruno, a Weimaraner considered by various judicial investigators as "the Messi of dogs" for his performance in resonant cases, framed the suspect with the fact.

Another of the dogs, Max, was the one who finally marked the place where the corpses were buried in the back of the house.

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According to the forensics who worked at the scene, Cristina had had her throat cut in the context of a fight and the girl had also received cuts on her neck, for which the attacker took advantage of the "vulnerable and defenseless condition of the victim, derived from their physical difference and strength".

Romero, who was Cristina's partner at the time of the incident, was arrested two days later and, after inventing an alibi, ended up confessing to the double femicide.

In the trial -to which Télam had access-, prosecutor Jorge Grieco considered that in an informal statement before the police, the defendant accused an acquaintance of his that he sold marijuana to consume and made "soap opera and improbable in which, incredibly, it was a victim who acted under coercion in order to stay alive".

For the prosecutor, this version provided by the then suspect mobilized "a large number of police personnel, very few indeed in the midst of a health emergency, in order to evacuate a false and sterile line of investigation."

Finally, in his court statement, he confessed to the crime and said that he murdered his girlfriend while they were consuming pills and alcohol and that he then killed the girl, after which he dug the well in the back of the house and buried the bodies.

For Justice, the man covered the corpses with a layer of stone and then earth "for the purpose of concealing the homemade grave and making it difficult to intrude on it through excavations and simple searches."

In addition, in the elevation to trial, prosecutor Grieco points out that "multiple groups of canine brigade specialized in searching for corpses" and "numerous experts from the Scientific Police and Fire Department" worked at the scene, which delayed "close to three hours to dig up the bodies.

The investigators determined that the defendant "cleaned the main scene (interior of the house) with great dedication, washing the blood, turning one of the mattresses so that the blood trace is not visible, even washing a bear in the washing machine stuffed animal and bedding".

In addition, for the investigation, Romero seized Cristina's cell phone and "answered messages to her eldest daughter, setting up a theater in which she posed as the victim in order to even arouse suspicion."

It's that Dolores, another of Cristina's daughters, was looking for her mother and sister for several days because she hadn't heard from them, and she wrote messages on her cell phone and received implausible responses, so she began to suspect that something had happened to them.

When the young woman asked Romero, he argued that Cristina went to a neighbor's, so she took advantage of a distraction and ran away from home.

The investigators indicated that during the two days in which he was a fugitive, the young man visited the mother of his son (whom he brought diapers to), and went to a friend's house to finally stay at the home of his sister, where he was arrested.

In his investigation, Romero "confessed to being the only material and ideological author of femicide and infanticide (...), he narrated the way in which he carried it out and how he tried to cover the traces of the criminal actions deployed, answering questions about For example, the position of the bodies when they were buried, details that if he had not done so, it would be impossible for him to know"