Johan SPO, the young man who stabbed his ex-girlfriend to death in February 2022, who was only 17 years old in the municipality of Totana, Murcia, will spend 22 years in prison after accepting all the charges he was accused of this Thursday. The trial against the boy, who was 19 years old when he committed the crime and has since been in prison, was supposed to start this Thursday at the provincial court of Murcia, but it did not take place, because the lawyers of the accused and the victim, as well as the prosecution, reached an agreement: Johan admitted to killing his ex-girlfriend and will serve a sentence three years shorter than that initially requested by the prosecution and the accusation for a crime of murder with the aggravating circumstance of gender.
In addition to the two decades he will have to spend behind bars, he will have to be on probation for another 10 years when he is released from prison and will not be allowed to approach the victim’s relatives during the same period. As the victim’s lawyer, Raúl Pardo Geijo, explained to EL PAÍS, the teenager’s relatives accepted this agreement because they already knew in advance that the killer would not serve the required 25 years in prison. Having accepted being the perpetrator of the crime, both before the police, during the judicial investigation and today before the court, it is mandatory to apply the mitigating circumstance of confession, for which the maximum sentence cannot exceed 22 and a half years of imprisonment. An additional six months that they give up to avoid having to undergo a jury trial in which aggravating circumstances such as treason or cruelty could have occurred, which could have reduced the sentence to 15 years. The lawyer also insisted that at no point did they consider accepting a sentence of less than 22 years, due to the “horrific” nature of the crime. A murder that shocked the entire Region of Murcia due to its brutality and the young age of the murderer and the victim. The convicted man will also have to compensate the parents and brothers of the murdered woman with over 200 thousand euros, in addition to legal costs (the victim’s family’s lawyer has waived the payment).
The sentence has been passed invoice on the basis of the joint drafting of the agreement, which recalls that the victim and the attacker had been dating for about a year, until her breakup at the end of 2021. A relationship in which Johan had always tried to control the young woman, and continued to try after the breakup to convince her to return to him. When the boy realized that this would not happen, as expected in the agreement, he decided to kill her.
To do this, he convinced her to meet to return some things, took her to the warehouse of his home in a central street of Totana, a town of just under 34 thousand inhabitants, and attacked her with a knife that he had hidden in his clothes. He stabbed her 79 times and forensic analyzes established that the teenager tried to defend herself from the attacks, from which she could not escape given the small size of the storage room. After committing the crime, Johan hid the body, cleaned up the blood, hid the knife and even had dinner with his mother, while the victim’s relatives reported his disappearance to the security forces. He confessed to the crime the next day. The victim had not reported him for sexist violence and had no criminal record.
So far this year, 36 women have been killed by their partners or ex-partners. Since official statistics began in 2003, there are 1,331 women.
The 016 telephone line assists victims of sexist violence, their families and those around them 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 different languages. The number is not recorded on the phone bill, but the call must be canceled from the device. You can also contact via email 016-online@igualdad.gob.es and via WhatsApp on 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation telephone number 900 20 20 10. In case of emergency it is possible to call 112 or the telephone numbers of the State Police (091) and the Civil Guard (062). And if you can’t call you can use the ALERTCOPS application, from which an alert signal is sent to the Police with geolocation.
