The 17-year-old girl took care of her five-year-old brother, who remained hospitalized in San Juan de Dios (Manresa) | When the morning shift nurse arrived, they were gone.
San Juan de Dios Hospital, Manresa, second floor. It is September 5, 1988. Jesus accompanies his brother in the hospital, admitted for an asthmatic attack. He is 13 years old and he is bored, escapes to smoke a cigarette. At the time it was allowed, or at least approved, that minors smoke and, furthermore, that it be done in a room designated for it, within the center itself.
He heard some children shout: “A man dressed as a doctor takes them away in a wheelchair”, bill. The scene that follows, if true, shocks: “they gave them an injection and covered them with a white sheet”. “Those children were my brothers Isidre and Dolors,” says Mari Carmen Orrit. They disappeared 34 years ago and, until a few months ago, no one had provided any information. It is the first testimony that the family receives in decades from someone who was in that hospital that morning.
“Where are the children?”
“At 09:00 on that September 5, the Urban Police knocked on the door,” recalls Mari Carmen. María, his mother, took care of her children before going to work. “Where are the children? Where are Isidre and Dolors?” They asked as soon as they opened.
“In the San Juan de Dios,” answered the woman. Isidre, the youngest of her children, of the 14 she had -15 were born, but Montserrat died when she was 3 months old- she had been admitted two days before, since the penicillin treatment that they gave him to treat angina had caused a reaction. His 17-year-old sister, Dolors, stayed with him for the night. “They are not in the hospital”, the agents responded.
“My mother raised her hands to her head: ‘if they are not there, where are they going to be?'” recalls Mari Carmen. Two months ago she had been widowed. Two of her children had just disappeared. Thirty-four years later they are still not there.
After decades of searching, in 2021 Jesus decided to explain for the first time what he claims he saw that day. He did it on the TV show ‘Viva la Vida’. He was a child at the time and was on the same floor as Isidre and Dolors.
Three people
“She saw how they put Dolors in a wheelchair with Isidre in her arms,” says Mari Carmen. “They were crying and calling my mother”. Jesus assures that the screams have not been removed from his head 34 years later. He followed them, “he saw that they went down to the bottom… he also went down,” narrates Mari Carmen.
“There was a curtain, like the ones in swimming pools, made of plastic. He assures that he pushed it aside and saw that the child was given an injection and stopped crying. That they threw him on a stretcher and covered him with a white sheetsays the woman. “My sister kept crying. They gave her another injection and they covered her with another white sheet”. In the room, the witness describes, there were some more stretchers, with green sheets.
“There were three people,” he says, “dressed as a doctor: the one who lowered my brothers with the wheelchair, another who was waiting for him and who gave them the injection and a third man who was doing like an autopsy“. This last one, affirms Jesus, looked towards where he was and saw him. “He said: ‘take him!’ And then he ran off.”
“My brother’s doctor said when he disappeared that he was going on vacation and that he was not going to miss it for a prank,” says Mari Carmen
Until 2021 the investigation was silent. Two minors, two children, had disappeared in a hospital. Nothing else was known. There were three police hypotheses: kidnapping, elopement or family abduction. The alert jumped when the nurse, around 6:30 in the morning, came in to put the thermometer on the child. “It was when they saw that neither of them were there.”
It was searched late and little, denounces Mari Carmen: “The Urban Guard showed up at home, but when my mother asked them what to do, they were told that they had to wait 24 or 48 hours to file the complaint and start looking“. The shock prevailed. “The dogs took 15 days to track down the medical center; the first interrogations were made six years after the disappearance”.
The hospital was little involved, Orrit laments: “the director, through a nurse, told us that this was not a prison and whoever he wanted came and went.” He still has a hard time understanding it, “Isidre was 5 years old…wasn’t that his responsibility?” The doctor who took the child did not help much more, says the family: “He said he was going on vacation to Turkey and that for a prank he was not going to miss it“.
A possible leak was investigated: “My sister was not ready to run awayr, I was a very introverted girl and had a visual disability, that was detected a little late, and cost him learning. When they saw that she needed glasses she was older, she didn’t know about her or the lyrics, she couldn’t manage by herself “. It was discarded.Another line of investigation was to rule out a possible abduction by the family: “For a long time we thought about that theory,” says Mari Carmen. “A girl from the cafeteria said that she heard my uncles say that my mother had to be forced to give the children up for adoption when my father was admitted to the San Juan de Dios Hospital for cancer… but my father He was never in that hospital,” adds the woman.
A private investigator, who helped the Orrit family for years, pointed in that direction. “But it doesn’t make sense… If you have money and you risk taking the children, you make your life elsewhere and have them with you. What you don’t do is stay in your town -he stayed- and send these children with other relatives.
“A police officer told me that they still wanted the child for an adoption and they had taken my sister to work as a prostitute”
Investigators also ruled out kidnapping: “It’s the only thing left, right? Organ trafficking, white slavery, adoption…”, Mari Carmen meditates harshly and painfully. “At first the police said that who was going to kidnap some children who were nobodyBut, then, what happened?” cries the woman.
“A police officer told me that they still wanted the child for adoption and my sister had been taken to a prostitution site. I remember I told her: but it’s a girl!… and she replied ‘well, there are many men who like girls‘. My heart stopped.”
A detective
Over the years the Orrit family has battled the elements to find out what happened. María wrote to the King, to Jordi Pujol… she did not receive a response beyond the acknowledgment of receipt.
The summary “riddled with contradictions”, Orrit denounces, only has one conclusive evidence: Dolors’s glasses that were supposedly found in the room. “After 30 years they give them to us: we have studied the DNA, they are not from my sister, they are from an older person.”
The Orrit family has suffered absence and oblivion, also cheating. A detective stole 50,000 pesetas from them at the time. “With the situation of my mother, a widow, with eleven children at home, three out already… He asked us for the money to start investigating. We went to La Caixa and, since they saw us so badly, they allowed us to return it little by little, “he recalls . They paid the detective “and he never saw us again.”
case filed
Justice considered the hypothesis of kidnapping in the case of Isidre and that of inducing her to leave home in the case of Dolors. The case was filed in 2016. The new testimony, that of the witness, brought to the Court of Manresa, was not enough to reopen the case, the crimes had prescribed. “What evidence is there of induction…? It’s a disappearance,” denounces Mari Carmen. The difference, judicially, is notable: disappearances do not prescribe until the absent person appears; crimes, yes.
They have taken their claim to the Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from Strasbourg and await a reply. “We ask that it be reviewed, that it be treated as a disappearance. They have spent years saying that there is no thread to pull from and now that we have it, they do not want to hear it.”
Ángela, María Rosa, Alfredo, Mari Carmen, Engracia, Manel, Jordi, Isabel, Montserrat, Yolanda, Marta, Daniel, María Teresa… are María’s children. Two are missing from this list: Isidre and Dolors. She doesn’t know where they are.
