A MAN who beat his 75-year-old father to death after discovering he had been abusing his nine-year-old son has been cleared of murder in Torrent, Valencia.
State prosecutors had requested up to nine years in prison for the incident, and a private prosecution sought by the elderly man’s family asked for 22 years, but this was rejected by the court and the defendant was cleared of intending to murder his father.
The grandfather had been suffering from lung cancer and his health was already in decline at the time of the attack, the court heard.
He passed away four months after the beating, and the defence argued that the man died of natural causes relating to his age and chronic illness and not as a direct result of the beating.
Instead, the defence asked for three months in prison for assault.
The attack occurred on March 2, 2016 when the accused picked up his son from school and the child began to cry in the car, the youngster then told his father what had happened with his grandfather, detailing how he had been committing sexual acts against him.
On learning this, the defendant said that he had travelled to the home of his father to confront him over the accusations, but had not intended to commit murder.
He entered the dining room of the home and closed the door so that his father’s carers could not overhear the conversation, he said: “I told him he was a rapist. He got up, faced me and denied everything, and then I hit him, only with my hands … he fell to the side, hit a chair and then stopped hitting him”.
Following the attack the defendant returned to his home, collected his ID and turned himself in at a police station.
The accused claimed that it was only afterwards that he began to reflect on the damage he had done to his father, and that until the incident he had always considered his father to be his “idol”. The elderly man was taken to hospital, where he remained in critical condition for 41 days.
He died four months after the attack, on July 5, 2016.
The defendant, who has refused to answer the questions raised by the private prosecution, recalled that he “blindly” believed his son: “My son does not have a mobile phone or access to pornography. He is not capable of inventing something like that”.
The defendant has stressed that he never thought that his father could abuse a child, but he was aware that he had a huge collection of hundreds of pornographic movies, and on his birthdays he would visit brothels with his sons-in-law.
The defendant has been found guilty on assault charges and awaits sentencing.
