Sentenced to Five Years in Prison for Strangling Her Mother in Torrevieja

The Prosecutor’s Office lowered her initial request for 26 years in prison after an agreement with the defense. The defendant suffered a psychotic break on the day of the crime

The Provincial Court has sentenced a Lithuanian woman of Russian origin to five years in prison who strangled her 78-year-old mother with a rope while she was resting in a bed at her home in Torrevieja. The crime was going to be prosecuted by a popular jury at the end of last July in Elche, but the Prosecutor’s Office, which initially requested 26 years in prison, and the defense, exercised by the lawyer Roberto Sánchez Martínez, reached an agreement of conformity and reduced the sentence to five years by modifying the accusation of murder to homicide and applying the incomplete defense of mental anomaly, the mitigating factor of late confession and the aggravating factor of kinship.

The facts declared proven in the sentence handed down by the presiding magistrate of the jury court, Francisco Javier Saravia, occurred in June 2021 in Torrevieja.

25 meter rope

The defendant, a woman born in Russia but with Lithuanian nationality, decided to end the life of her 78-year-old mother at the address on Sal de Torrevieja street where they lived. She thought of strangling her with a rope and on the afternoon of June 2 she went to a hardware store located on the same street. In said establishment she bought a rope 25 meters long and 5 millimeters thick and left.

The next day, June 3, she and her mother were drinking vodka on the terrace of the house. Later, her mother lay down on the bed in her bedroom to rest and that was when the crime occurred shortly after, between five and six in the afternoon.

The defendant, taking advantage of the fact that her mother was under the influence of alcohol, took the rope that she had bought at the hardware store and entered her mother’s bedroom. Immediately afterwards, she “acting with the intention of ending her life, and using the rope as an instrument of suffocation, she strangled her until she ended her life,” as stated in the conviction.

The sentence states that she caused his death due to “acute pulmonary edema and respiratory failure secondary to mechanical asphyxia due to probable suffocation and occlusion of respiratory orifices.”

Blood stains

In the search carried out by the Civil Guard after discovering the crime in the victim’s home, the agents found in the living room of the house the rope with blood stains that the defendant used to strangle her mother.

Likewise, the wrapping of the rope bought at the hardware store the day before was intervened in a garbage container and in the kitchen of the house was the bottle of vodka supplied to the deceased.

Mental illness

The sentence indicates that the defendant “suffered at the time of the commission of the facts of a mental illness, psychotic break, which diminished her intellective and volitional capacities”, but “without completely annulling them.”

The accused woman, who was released pending the trial, went to the City of Justice in Elche on July 27 and appeared accompanied by her lawyer Roberto Sánchez to sign the agreement protocol reached with the Prosecutor’s Office, plead guilty of the strangulation of his mother and waive the presentation of any appeal against the sentence.