The news shocked the city of Oncativo: a 72-year-old man killed his 74-year-old partner, and then took his own life. They had been together for almost 50 years. They had two daughters, who came to visit them every day, and several grandchildren.
In fact, one of the granddaughters was the first to see the scene that the Police would later make known. “The little girl got out of her mother’s car, she peeked through the doorknob of her grandparents’ house and ran back to the car, crying,” she described to The voice a neighbor who witnessed that moment.
Later, and following a call from one of the couple’s daughters, the Police broke into the house on Calle Alberdi. To enter they had to break the front door.
The police report states that the agents observed the body of Felisa Paulina De lo Santo, 74, in the kitchen. She had stab wounds up to her neck. In the bedroom, on the double bed, they found his lifelong partner, Mario Raúl Picca, 72, with sharp injuries to the abdomen and neck.
As it might be established, at least as the main hypothesis, although the investigation is open, he took her life, using a knife, and then committed suicide.
Pain and wonder in Oncativo
In the neighborhood where the couple lived for many years, they do nothing but speak well of them. “They were excellent. Very good people, very loved by all. In the followingnoon they would sit outside to drink mates,” said a neighbor, pointing to the couple’s house.
Another neighbor said that he had been living next to their house for many years. “I never heard of a fight,” he noted. When everything happened, he was in Córdoba. He now laments that, if he had been in his house, he might have done something.
And he said that almost every followingnoon they shared some mates. “Mario told me that he was very depressed because of his wife’s illness,” the man said.
Apparently the picture had been aggravated in recent times. The woman had recently gone missing and she was found in a field, several kilometers from her home.
“He tried to get out, but it was difficult for him. A few days ago he had gone for a walk, trying to clear his head a bit, but the next day he asked to go home because he was not feeling well, ”he recounted.
The man was under treatment. This Thursday I had a turn to see a psychiatrist and a neurologist.
The couple spent much of the day at his house, especially since he retired. Until not long ago Mario worked in his brother’s furniture store.
“Here we are all sad. We can’t believe what happened,” said another neighbor, staring at the couple’s home. “On Wednesday it caught my attention that the blind on the window was down. And then we found out everything, ”he recounted.
Femicide?
A femicide is always a homicide. However, the homicide of a woman is not necessarily a femicide. For it to constitute it, it has to mediate a particular violence and context. And that is what it is trying to determine judicially: if in the death of the Oncativo woman her partner would have killed her in a context of gender violence.
In the case, which has no defendants (it will not have them if it is closed as homicide followed by suicide), the Investigation Prosecutor of Río Segundo intervenes.
The file is in charge of the prosecutor María Florencia Esposito, who avoided making statements to the press.
Sources close to the cause said that there is still no confirmed hypothesis, although one appears as the main one, and that they are still in the middle of the investigation phase, so a legal framework has not yet been established.
So far, testimonies from relatives and neighbors were taken.
“With what we have, we can already rule out the probability of theft. We are facing a family situation,” they explained. And they slipped that it was not a marriage with a history of violence. There are no records of complaints in this regard.
What there is is a family and a moved city.
