Global Courant
There is little more than a block between the Sperani house and the gate of the Laboulaye cemetery. Silvio, Joaquín’s uncle, walks the 200 meters and is encouraged to enter for the first time since Monday, when he was the teenager’s burial.
The niche is still open and the offerings of flowers and crowns along with the photos of a Joaquín full of life are there, in the same place where they were left on Monday.
For Silvio, time stopped on Sunday when he ran and ran the six or seven blocks that separate the Police Station from the abandoned house where a few minutes before one of his nieces had found the body.
“This can’t stay like this,” says the man crying for his favorite nephew. “I will not forget the hugs he gave me when I came to visit him and the way he loved me,” he says, wrapped in deep emotion.
A week after the murder of Joaquín Sperani in Laboulaye, Córdoba, the city is still in shock and people gather to see the house where the murder occurred.
“Justice for Joaquín, Justice for Joaquín”, shouted Mariela Flores, the mother, in the march that went through the streets of Laboulaye on Wednesday night. The cold returned and the fear remains intact on the faces of the residents of this small city, in which almost everyone is known.
At the door of the Courts, Joaquín’s photos are joined by those of other victims of cases that did not have a resolution in Justice. People brought candles and lit them as a way of asking for light in the face of so much discomfort.
Since Sunday, the best friend of the dead teenager was placed in judicial custody and Judge Sebastián Moro decided to transfer him to the Esperanza Complex, a center for judicialized minors located in the provincial capital, 380 kilometers from Laboulaye.
The crime of Joaquín Sperani. In Laboulaye there was a new march to demand justice.
L. is 14 years old, and her confession before the investigators who came from Córdoba to closely follow the case when it was only a disappearance, raised many questions in the family and in the community. Beyond causing a profound impact on the province and the country.
More tests
“He had the discernment to put together a premeditated plan and kill,” Raúl Frencia, the lawyer representing Joaquín Sperani’s family, said Thursday.
The crime of Joaquín Sperani. Dozens of neighbors approach the house of horror in Laboulaye.
He pointed directly at the friend and schoolmate, who confessed to being the author of the crime. “He knew very well what he was doing and that he acted contemptuously,” Frencia said, adding: “The strongest hypothesis is that this person deceived him and led him into a death trap. For me, this person premeditated a systematic plan to achieve the objective, which was to kill Joaquín.”
“The case does not have to be closed because they have only one testimony. This is what is best for the judge and the Police, but there is something else here,” said a woman holding a lit candle.
There was also Joaquín’s little brother, now the eldest, and the one who hugs his mother without leaving her alone for a minute in the multitude of arms that held and caressed her.
The crime of Joaquín Sperani. The photos of the minor at school, who returned to class a week after the crime.
“You have to keep marching until there is some response from the Justice,” said another woman who came up to hug Mariela Flores at the end of the march in front of the school where the boy was last seen alive.
“You have to check the security cameras a thousand times to find out what happened, who was in the area in those minutes on Thursday afternoon because this could not have been done by a single person in such a short time,” said a man who was always close to the family in the march that walked down Independencia street, from the Ipem “Malvinas Argentinas” to the Court building.
The crime of Joaquín Sperani. His name is still written on the walls of the school.
Neighbors moved and sleepless
The neighbor who lives next to the house of terror assures that since Sunday at noon she has had a knot in her stomach that does not leave her alone for a minute.
“I can hardly sleep and I’m eating very little because the food doesn’t work for me,” the woman told Clarín.
On the block, on Sarmiento street, the abandoned house became a crowded place where the city’s inhabitants come to see with their own eyes what they have seen repeatedly on the national news channels from Monday onwards.
“I never heard or saw anything unusual and neither did that day. The neighbors knew that the boys came to the house to drink some soda and eat cookies and alfajores. The papers that were thrown away always remained in the fabric of my house and I took them out from time to time because I like to see everything clean”, says the woman.
On Sunday, she heard the desperate cry of Joaquín’s cousin when she found the body of the teenager lying inside the house. That was the beginning of the nightmare that the neighborhood, the school and the city are experiencing.
The woman, a retired teacher who preferred not to give her identity, said that she was interviewed by two Investigative police officers to whom she told what little she saw.
Another neighbor from the block affirms that no one came to ask her anything and that it is suspicious that the investigation was cut short with the testimony of a minor who “may be threatened.”
In the town, the wave of versions comes and goes from one corner to another and delves into the past of the two families that today are broken by pain.
Social networks and comments in local press outlets have become the platform for anonymous profiles to give free rein to hypotheses of unthinkable calibers.
The word revenge was also spoken and even a seer came out to present her own theory of the case through TikTok.
On Thursday morning, a week after her son’s crime, Mariela told Clarín that she had not yet dared to visit her son at the cemetery. “I was scared when there was a storm and last night I had the impulse to go protect him because it started to rain and there was a lot of thunder,” the mother said. Martín had the opportunity to witness the change of niche of the drawer that contains the remains of his son from one space in the Cemetery to another.
“I feel that he was more than his father because I was also his soccer coach at Club Huracán,” he said. “He liked to wear my clothes and took with him a pair of sneakers that I bought a few weeks ago. He asked me for them and I gave them to him and on Thursday to go to school ”.
On Wednesday afternoon, Joaquín’s schoolmates returned to class. From the Ministry of Education of Córdoba there were conferences with the teachers in order to propose days of reflection with the boys, on their return to the classroom after such a tragedy.
The name Joaquín is written on the walls of the building, perhaps in the same handwriting as the murdered young man.
Cordova. Correspondent
SC
