The Criminal Court number eight of Valencia has sentenced to two years in prison for the crime of abandoning a person with a disability in need of special protection to the non-professional caregiver of a 93-year-old woman, hired by the son of the deceased and appointed by the Ministry of Social Welfare, for “Failure to provide essential care and necessary attention” to the nonagenarian for months, by focusing all her attention – morning and afternoon, seven days a week – on the family business, specifically a greengrocer that her husband had opened.
As a consequence of this neglect and lack of care, for which the accused charged 1,200 euros per month, At the end of January 2017, the old woman presented a “state of significant malnutrition, great dehydration, lack of hygiene and unhealed wounds”, as has been proven in the sentence.
The serious state of the nonagenarian was detected after her son asked the General Directorate of Social Services and Dependent People, of the Generalitat, to review her situation and refer her to a residence in a Torrent urbanization.
It was in the residential care center where they appreciated these serious problems of malnutrition and muscle atrophy for having been bedridden, hardly moving, for the last year. In addition to vomiting and dehydration, for which she was referred to the Emergency Department of the General Hospital of Valencia, where the nonagenarian finally died four days later.
Although primary cause of death was lower respiratory tract infectionthe sentence establishes that the previous situation in which the woman was “due to lack of care, could have acted in any case as a concausation worsening the evolution of the process”.
The defense of the caregiver, a 32-year-old woman of Romanian nationality, attributed the accusation for lack of attention to the complaint that her client filed on those dates, December 2016, against her ex-husband, stepson of the son of the woman to whom She had been caring for her since 2011 without there having been any kind of previous problem with her job. So, heThe accused alleged in court that she fed him five times a day and changed his diaper as many, that the old woman did not tell him that she was in pain and that she did not notice that she had any wounds or ulcers. In the same way, she attributes the lack of hygiene to the fact that they took her to her residence without cleaning her in the morning.
However, both the Prosecutor’s Office and the private prosecution, brought by the lawyer Alicia Baixauli, maintained that the state presented by the nonagenarian had not been able to arise from one day to the next. This is how the sentence concludes, based on what was stated by the residence doctor about the health situation in which he arrived at the center. “The state of the elderly woman described by the residence doctor can only be justified from the most absolute apathy and lack of interest in caring for women.”
Other indicators, such as peeling skin all over his body, or his unawareness of the wound on his back, point in the same direction: “Considering proven that the last months of her life the old woman did not receive the necessary care, not being fed and hydrated properly and in sufficient quantity, and not being cleaned and washed periodically”. For this, he imposes two years in prison and the payment of 4,000 euros in compensation to the son of the deceased.