The Barcelona serial killer lived in a caravan and acted with “excessive violence”

Five homeless people have died in Barcelona violently in Barcelona since the state of alarm was declared and the confinement began on March 14. Four of them could have been killed by the same person, a 35-year-old man of Brazilian nationality and Portuguese origin, whose only criminal record in Spain was an arrest for theft by the Civil Guard in Zaragoza.

The Mossos d’Esquadra cannot explain what led this man, a resident of a caravan located in Sant Cugat del Vallès (Barcelona), to break up to four times the confinement to hunt down the homeless people hidden in the center of Barcelona. They can prove that he used “excessive and free violence” to kill his victims, whom he gave “no opportunity to defend himself,” says Mayor Juan Carlos de la Granja, responsible for the investigation.

The detainee “has responded to police interrogations” but “has an incoherent speech,” says Interior Minister Miquel Buch, who is compatible with some type of mental illness. An extreme that could explain the motives of the alleged murderer, who claims to reside in Portugal although his documentation is Brazilian. The detainee, however, has denied any connection with the facts.

“The homicides against homeless people have ended,” the Mayor of La Granja affirmed forcefully on Tuesday, confirming the death of five homeless in the last month and a half in Barcelona, ​​although only four of these deaths can be related to the detainee. The fifth died this Sunday in Collcerola, but the regional police attribute his death to the accidental fire in the shelter in which he slept.

Fight with a knife

The first homicide took place on March 19, when a homeless man died of a stab wound, a modus operandi different from that of the subsequent deaths, which makes the regional police doubt about the authorship. It could be a fight between homeless people outside the serial killer arrested yesterday, they warn, although the investigation is currently open. It was a homeless man who slept sheltered at the entrance of a supermarket, on Sardenya street in Barcelona, ​​Buch confirmed, and “died after a knife fight.”

Almost a month later, on April 16, the second homicide occurred, around the Auditori de Barcelona. A homeless man was killed by a strong blow to the head, attributed by the regional police to a hammer, mallet or similar. Just 36 hours later, the next death occurred, on Calle Caspe. In both cases, the security cameras of the Auditori and the Justice Department, close to the third murder, registered the person responsible and allowed the Mossos to confirm that it was the same person.

On Monday night, the murderer attacked his latest victim in the surroundings of the Sagrada Familia. This time, however, a witness saw the assassin violently hit a homeless man on the head with a bar and alerted the police and emergencies through 112. When they arrived, the victim was still breathing but there was nothing they could do to save his lifetime. It was a foreign man in his 30s.

By then, however, the Mossos had already deployed a “large device in Barcelona’s Ensanche” to catch the murderer, Buch explained. “This device allows to react quickly after the new events” on Monday night, so with the help of the witness, on Tuesday it was possible to locate and arrest the suspect.

Vulnerable collective

The murders “affect one of the most vulnerable groups,” Buch has denounced. “This vulnerability has meant that the body of Mossos has been involved and dedicated many resources to solve the case.” The intendant Farm adds that the murderer “left no defense to the victims the violence was excessive and free

The serial murder of four homeless in the last month in Barcelona has exposed the vulnerability of homeless people in the midst of a Covid-19 pandemic. With the streets empty and the offers of more shelters by the administrations, their presence in the streets was more incomprehensible and annoying to some. And it has made them the target of more insults and contempt than usual, explains the president of Arrels, Ferran Busquets.

“Right now we cannot have a clear image” of the situation of this group, Busquets explains. The last still photo is the census carried out by Arrels in June 2019, when 1,195 homeless people slept on the streets of Barcelona. With the aim of sheltering them during the pandemic, the Barcelona City Council opened the refuge at the Fira de Barcelona, ​​but many of them have not come to that space, acknowledges the president of Arrels.

“Some of the people who live on the street will never go to a space like this,” says Busquets, for fear of sharing the space with other homeless people or “having to start again from scratch,” that is, adapt to the street when the shelter closes. Aware of this reality, the mossos asked Arrels for help after the first murders, to use their network of contacts and their street team to advise homeless people to sleep in company these weeks.

Living on the street “they are a group very exposed to violence,” Busquet explains. According to the latest Arrels survey, four out of ten have been assaulted, and this extreme exposure to assailants has been amplified by confinement.

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