• Trial The head of the investigation of the crime of the boy of Lardero: "His death was extremely violent"
  • Events The accused of the crime of Lardero says he remembers everything as a "cloud" and alleges that the child acted "voluntarily"

Francisco Javier Almeida is the perversion of evil. It says the judicial curriculum that has accompanied him for 30 years – date of his first conviction for rape (he is a sexual aggressor who is not rehabilitated) – and certifies him since Monday his behavior in the trial for the rape and strangulation of little Alex, 9 years old, in October 2021 after taking him deceived from a park in Lardero (La Rioja). These days, his curved and zigzagging personality has lengthened. The accusations ask that he no longer leave prison: permanent prison reviewable.

He sits in the dock for the boy's crime, but comes to him with a 1998 sentence that sentenced him to 25 years for killing a 26-year-old real estate agent in the wildest way possible. Like Alex. The violence he used was such that the judges stopped at it to emphasize that he recreated himself in the agony of his victim. The 16 stab wounds he gave him – before the last fatal one in the heart – he executed, the magistrates said, "with the intention of becoming sexually aroused when (the victim) was still alive."

The judge who wrote it after the verdict of the people's court highlighted the "serious suffering" of the woman. This ruling helps to deepen the catacombs of the mind of Almeida, also holder of another conviction for sexual assault, dated 1993, for which he spent four years in prison of the seven to which he was sentenced. He kidnapped a 13-year-old girl, sexually assaulted her and, when he wanted to strangle her with a cable, she managed to escape.

Francisco Javier Almeida, in his window days before killing Álex, in a photo taken by the children of Lardero.

Three decades later, he acted the same with Álex. The boy was unable to flee because Almeida locked his apartment, took him to the bedroom, undressed him, raped him, strangled him and redressed him. He executed the barbarity – according to the testimony of a local policeman during the trial he had already tried other children through lies – in just 20 minutes. The day he killed Alex, Almeida should not have been free. He had two years left to serve the sentence of 25 for the crime of the real estate agent but, against the criteria of the majority of professionals who treated him in prison – who did not trust either his reintegration or his recovery – he was granted the third degree.

In the trial, another particularly painful fact has been revealed: the first neighborhood call warning that Almeida had tried to take a child is from April 14, 2021. Six months before he murdered Alex. It was a mother who alerted the local police but could not be located. He used the same tactic as with Alex on Halloween night, when he approached the park where he played and convinced him to accompany him home, deceiving him that he was going to show a puppy.

After killing him, she took him in her arms, left the floor and waited for the elevator to take him away. He was surprised by the Police and the Civil Guard, who had already been alerted. Since then, he was silent. He did not want to testify either before the investigators or before the judge on duty or before the investigator. He only did so when he entered prison. He asked to see a priest. It was to ask him for clothes.

Extreme violence and brutality

Before the jury, he has broken this trend. It was in his statement last Monday and in it he unloaded the responsibility on the child. He said the boy did it all "voluntarily." He attributed his behavior to the fact that he had drunk and that he did not remember anything. The agent who instructed the proceedings, on the other hand, took the stand a heartbreaking story and denied it to his annoyance. He assured that the marks presented by Alex were "of extreme violence". The child, the agents added, had bruises on his mouth, upper gum and inner lip, marks of "high violence." He also had in the neck, the result of a suffocation caused from behind, with his arm, raising it even upwards. Something that made the child "at all" have a means of defense. Yesterday it was the turn of the forensics who did the autopsy. They stated that the child died of asphyxiation after an assault exercised with extreme violence and brutality.

They insisted that he had no possibility of defense. All the bruises that Alex had on his face, neck and chest occurred in life, many of them by subjection or immobilization, as interpreted in their report. Another forensic team, in this case psychiatric, drew Almeida's profile months ago. The professionals resolved that his personality, far from approaching torment, is revealed to be slow and smooth. In their dossier, they presented a man with zero repentance and who is perfectly capable of distinguishing good from evil. He knew what he was doing. "We can conclude that there is no psychiatric diagnosis or psychopathological alteration," they said.

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  • La Rioja
  • Lardero
  • Justice