He heard how they killed his mother and remembered her with blood in his heart

Lying on the bed, face up, a hole in the heart. This is how they found Karen López, 29 years old, a Buenos Aires police officer. Her 8-year-old son Giovanni was in the next room at Merlo’s house. He heard the shot.

Jonathan Arancibia, his stepfather and also a force agent, told him that his mother had killed herself. He called 911 two hours later. “No one commits suicide by shooting himself in the heart”, said Claudia, Karen’s mother, then. And she repeats it today: she claims that her daughter was the victim of femicide. 4 years passed. They are still waiting for justice.

There are hours of that Sunday, February 16, 2020 that remained in the nebula. But there is one thing that Claudia is clear about: the call she received was very strange and messy. “It was late already. I called the commissioner and he told me that my daughter had killed herself. That there were experts at the scene investigating. “Later I verified that that had not happened.”

“It’s impossible, it’s impossible,” Claudia repeated. Yeah chained to the door of Prosecutor’s Office No. 11 of Morón until he managed to speak with the prosecutor María Alejandra Bonini, in charge of the investigation. “There was no way my daughter would have committed suicide. We had been talking about Giovanni and how close it was until school started… we had plans. Arancibia killed Karen because she must have discovered something“.

Claudia talks about a drawing she found of Giovanni. It’s Karen with a broken heart, a trickle of blood, several numbers.

“What would that drawing mean? I tried to delve into a conversation with my grandson, seeking to get inside him. His response surpassed my capacity for surprise,” says Claudia.

“It was her mother, my daughter. As she tried to explain to me the reason for each detail, each stroke, my emotion grew. The drawing was her with her yellow t-shirt, the most precious, with a heart in the middle of his chest, which denoted his absence and a fatal wound from a murderous shot. Seeing him like that was very hard and cruel,” Claudia laments.

They asked him about the numbers. What did they mean? “If you know how to add, the result is 16, the date they took away my mother.”He said.

“Needless to say, what followed was a total shower of tears on the part of both of us. I tried, even if only for a while, alleviate their pain by trying to hide my own, so that he would suffer less, and thus mitigate that sadness. How do you explain the inexplicable?” Claudia asks. They painted butterflies and hummingbirds.

“He misses her, I feel sadness,” Giovanni says. Remember to go shopping together, do homework. “When I see our photos I cry. “At school events too, because he’s not there.”

Giovanni is now 12 years old and is going to start secondary school. He likes to play ball and is a Racing fan. The weekends are spent with their father, Gonzalo. From Monday to Friday he is with his grandmother Claudia, at her house in San Justo.

“I have taken care of Giovanni since he was a child and now that he doesn’t have his mother I am your grandmother, your mother, your friend, your eternal comfort. “They remember her every day. They set up an altar for Karen. Giovanni asks her to go back to the past.

At the time, Arancibia was detained, but they immediately released him. The cover said “suicide,” and no one investigated much further. Claudia insisted, protested, chained herself. She managed to get him prosecuted, to get him removed from the force. The cover now says “investigation of cause of death”and are awaiting elevation to trial.

“Arancibia is loose, free as the wind. He is with a woman, with whom he cheated on my daughter. They have a daughter. Now he runs a kiosk, he lives in González Catán. I have him close, I came across him several times, every time I saw him it was torture for my soul.“Claudia admits.

Karen lived together for six months with her son and Arancibia. “During that time there were many changes in her behavior, She stayed away from us since she started living with him. Her companions knew it. I asked them to declare at that moment that the femicide happened, but They told me that they couldn’t say anything because they were going to be left without work.“.

He says that in November he went with the lawyer to talk to residents of Arancibia “to find out if the prosecutor’s office had ever gone to do an environmental report so that more would be known about that day, and my suspicions were true. The prosecution did not do its job, it never sought anything“.

Claudia assures that she spoke with a neighbor “who lives next to the house where Karen’s life was taken, and the woman said that that day, On February 16, 2020, at three-thirty in the afternoon, he heard a very loud communication. But in the forensic reports he said that death occurred hours later. “My lawyer went to the prosecutor’s office and asked them to look for those witnesses, but we still don’t have any news.”

“The same neighbor told us that that afternoon she had seen my daughter holding hands with the baby, that they were both very happy,” sobs Claudia, who is getting worse every day, with health problems. “I’m always trying to continue, to cover that impossible void.”.

The year of Karen’s death (2020) there were 13 feminicides committed by police officers, with official weapons. In January of this year alone, 30 feminicides were recorded: in three (10%) the perpetrators are from security forces.

Giovanni is one of the more than two thousand children who were left without their mother in the last decade due to feminidios. Claudia is part of the group Crossed by feminidio. In 2018 there were eight families. Today there are more than 230 from all over the country. They also ask for memory, truth and justice.