The daughter of the elderly man who died on August 3, 2023 in afire in his house in ses Païsses, in Ibiza, recalled in the trial that she warned at the time that the accused, who was her brother’s partner, “seemed to her to be a dangerous woman“.
“Since she came into our lives, my brother tried to take his own life and my father was murdered,” she said in the second session of the popular jury trial being held at the Audiencia de Palma against a woman accused of ending the life of an elderly man by setting fire to his house and for which she faces revisable permanent imprisonment.
When asked by the prosecutor, Mamen Navarro, the victim’s daughter, who has testified separated from the accused by a partition, recalled that although at the beginning “she did not see anything strange about her”, as time went by she found her “dangerous”.
The woman recalled that the defendant offered to take care of her mother, who was ill with Alzheimer’s disease, while her father was in the hospital, although she was told that it was not necessary. Later, when the man got better “she wouldn’t leave anyway”. She recalled that she had a copy of the keys to the house.
He also recalled an episode, a few days before the events, of a suicide attempt by the victim’s son, with whom he was in a relationship, and who had apparently warned him of his intentions, according to what the elderly man later told him.
On this matter, the father went so far as to tell her that the day his son tried to take his own life, she “calmly” came down from the part of the house where her son resided and spent more than half an hour smoking.“She was always with the matches,” he added.
That day, the sister recalled, she was told at the hospital that the defendant had presented herself as responsible for the family and that was why she was asking them for money. It was then that they decided to “kick her out of the house”, although without success.
When questioned by the defense, who returned to the subject of the keys, the old man’s daughter reiterated that “when he left on July 11 [the day of the attempted suicide of the old man’s son] the keys he had were nowhere to be found.
Regarding the house fire, he recalled that it was “as if a bomb had fallen”.
In Tuesday’s session, a woman who began to take care of the elderly couple just a few days before the events and who was the one who managed to rescue the woman from the fire in the house also testified as a witness. “Where are the grandparents?”, she has recalled asking the neighbors who were already in the street at the time when she left the house after waking up because of the noises and smoke.
On the night of the events, a neighbor recalled the moments of “terror” he experienced during those moments.
The facts
The Jury Court of the Provincial Court holds from Monday the trial against a woman for allegedly setting a fire in a house where two elderly people she was taking care of were sleeping in August 2023 in Ibiza.
She is charged with one count of murder and one count of arson and the prosecution requests that she be sentenced to life imprisonment.
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, at the time of the events one of the elderly was a totally dependent person, was unable to leave the property and died.
