Source: Women are Human
ES — Betancuria, Canary Islands. A male savagely bludgeoned and chocked to death a female relative in a lust killing. Now the victim’s family fears the murderer may receive a lighter sentence and transfer to a women’s prison, because he is identifying as a woman.
On 4 June, 2018, Jonathan de Jesús Robaina Santana, aged 21, waited until his aunt Sonia Padilla left her Betancuria, Fuerteventura home after dawn to go to work. Aware that his cousin Vanessa Santana, aged 21, was alone, Robaina Santana entered the home.
Relatives say Robaina Santana had become “obsessed” with Vanessa Santana, though the cousins had grown up together like siblings. Ms Padilla had adopted her nephew, raising him as her son and giving him her names, after the boy’s mother died in childbirth. According to Padilla, her daughter “was continually missing clothes,” because Robaina Santana would enter the household with stolen keys to raid her belongings. “There was a moment when he attacked her and my girl did not want to report him because he was her cousin and she loved him,” Padilla said.
That June morning, Robaina Santana went into Santana’s room and struck her 30 times with a hammer, using “extreme violence” and targeting “vital areas,” especially the head, court records show. He continued to beat Santana after she fell mortally wounded to the ground. He then used a belt to asphyxiate her.
The act of murder so excited Robaina Santana that he ejaculated on her, an investigation found. Investigators say Robaina Santana sexually defiled the deceased young woman before leaving her body wrapped in a blanket in the hallway.
“She was my daughter, my girl, my princess, and they took her from me from one day to the next,” Padilla testified before the Provincial Court of the Jury. When Padilla had returned from work that morning, “I went upstairs, I saw blood in the bathroom, and when I entered her room, it was all full of blood. I found my dead baby girl in a pool of blood in the hallway, wrapped in her duvet with a belt around her neck and disfigured. I told her, ‘Come back to mother, my love,’ and she did not answer me.”
Suspicion immediately fell on Robaina Santana, because he was “not affected by the death of his cousin,” a neighbor testified.
Robaina Santana was arrested four days after the murder, and held in Tahiche prison.
At trial, defense attorney Roberto Orive requested that his client be addressed as Lorena, the name by which he is known in the Penitentiary Institutions. Orive told the court that Robaina Santana is permitted to wear feminine clothes in private, and shower apart from the other inmates.
Robaina Santana has confessed to the murder, claiming it was an “outburst” caused by mental illness. He is denying having committed the sex act, arguing, “I am a woman, and I do not want to be with a girl, but with a man.” If found guilty of the sex act, Robaina Santana could be sentenced to up to 15 additional years in prison, on top of the murder sentence.
Nayara, who is cousin to both the killer and the deceased, said,
No one believes that it was an outburst. Jonathan snuck into my cousin’s house that night with keys he had previously stolen from my aunt’s house. Wearing gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, with ropes, two knives and a hammer. When he finished, he turned the bloody mattress upside down to hide the stains. He put the bloody clothes in a bag and threw them in an uninhabited house. That’s not an outburst.
She expressed doubt about Robaina Santana’s claim to identify as a woman with an attraction to men. “He never, ever said that he wanted to be a woman or anything like that. Nor that he was attracted to men; he never had relationships with men. He was always after women and always related to them in a very complicated way, harassing them.” She said he had had no luck with women due to his short stature and “complex.”
Robaina Santana’s cousin fears the effects of his claims. “His sex change could end up in a women’s prison. Imagine that would be that for the prisoners, who are real women. Forcing them to live with a confessed murderer of women.”
The prosecution is requesting Robaina Santana be sentenced to 27 years in prison.
