The popular jury issued a unanimous guilty verdict against the three accused of the murder of a couple and their daughter which occurred in Chiloeches (Guadalajara) on April 13, 2024. The friends planned a robbery that ended with the triple crime and focused their defense in the trial on their drug addiction, but this mitigating circumstance was not considered by the jury. The events occurred in a house in the Medina Azahara residential complex, where Ángel Villar and Elvira Fernández, aged 52 and 53, their daughter Laura and their youngest son Yeray, aged 22, lived, having managed to escape through a window. The couple and their eldest daughter were brutally murdered by Fernando Peña, 26 years old and confessedly guilty, with a bayonet almost 40 centimeters long which he carried and abandoned on the spot.
Fernando Peña is the main defendant. And his alleged accomplices are his “party” companions, cousins David Moreno Álvarez and Cristian Borja Moreno, aged 27 and 25. The jury finds Peña guilty of robbery with violence, three murders and fire damage, as he set fire to the house to try to cover his tracks. Moreno, guilty as an accomplice of robbery with violence, with the mitigating circumstance of confession, since he was the first to present himself to the Guardia Civil and tell what had happened. And Cristian, Laura’s partner at the time of the events and alleged facilitator of information on what his girlfriend’s parents had in the house, collaborator in the violent robbery, without mitigating circumstances.
The three belong to the so-called “Pioz mafia”, a municipality in Guadalajara with 5,200 inhabitants, 14 kilometers from Chiloeches. A sort of crowd of young people agitated since adolescence by frenetic drug use and love for martial arts. Peña, nicknamed The Red and nephew of a former mayor of the city, he was the leader of a group with a long history of robberies, scams, driving without a license, disobedience, resistance… David, who lived with his grandparents, without work or benefits and who had been treated for his drug addiction, was one of his regular companions in his misdeeds and in altercations in exchange for drugs. And Cristian, despite in theory not taking drugs and having a recognized 61% disability, was a “thorn in the neck” with his cousin Davide, as well as being the boyfriend of Laura, one of the three victims. The stories of their life in the courtroom highlighted this debauchery with drugs which they tried to turn into their main alibi with the help of their lawyers but which in the end the jury, after listening to experts, investigators and witnesses, did not consider.
The trial was heard for the sentence.
