The chilling complaint from the parents of the partner of the footballer Junior Benítez who committed suicide: “They saw her hang herself and none of her family warned her”

Between the night of the 31st and the early morning of the 1st January at the Ayala There was a party. Families from inside came to sit at the table and the postcard looked the same as that of any other house: gathering, meeting and end-of-year toast. They were the last moments of celebration in a house where the smile will take a while to return.

In the last minutes of 2023, Agustín knocked on his sister Anabelia’s bedroom door and did not answer her. Nothing new, they were already used to it at home: Her ex-partner kept her under control, didn’t let her stay with anyone, not even at home, and the night of the 31st was no exception. The toast was without her.

In the first seconds of 2024, as in all homes in the same time zone, glasses were clinked. But not everyone in the Malvinas Argentinas neighborhood did the same. In a house a few meters away, no one was clinking glasses.

“We didn’t toast because it was time and we didn’t toast because we were all with… How is it? Nothing, it seems that Junior and her have an application or, I don’t know, a camera that Junior was looking at and which, when cut, the girl crashed. And nothing, they called my house, did you see? because my aunt was there, so she could go and tell them that that bitch had hanged herself, because no one knew.is heard in a WhatsApp audio that makes you listen Clarion Jose Ayala. “She” is Anabelia, his daughter. And Junior, it is Oscar BenitezLanús footballer and Boca champion.

The voice of the audio It would be from Junior Benítez’s sister-in-lawThat He saw live and live how Anabelia hanged herself in her own room. It was the only way she had found to escape the harassment of the footballer who had not ended the relationship, not even after the report of violence against her and her family for which she wore an ankle bracelet under house arrest which she had not respected . .

Like the plaster Buddha resting in front of the front door of the house, José maintains serenity. He listens to the audio again and regrets it “no one from that family” He had the courage to tell what was happening in the room of his house. From the beginning she looked askance at her daughter’s boyfriend because he never got out of her truck even to say hello when he picked her up or dropped her off.

The same as the rest of the Benitez family, who he knows from the neighborhood. “They are quarrelsome, poorly educated”, he paints them. She doesn’t seek revenge. It didn’t occur to him to use violence. Believe in justice. In which he gets on the right path in the justice system, in the Divine and in social condemnation.

He hasn’t cried yet and explains on a tablet why his family lived with Benitez’s omnipresence. “It was either that or he lived somewhere else. Here we felt that we could take care of her”, he says calmly. He only regrets the answer he gave to his lawyer when he asked him for his opinion on the actual fulfillment of the sentence and did not ask to be in prison, but rather to enjoy home benefits.

“I thought about his children, about the possibility that they could continue to see their father. “I was thinking about his children and he wasn’t thinking about my daughter, I was wrong.”he says without shedding a tear.

The audio presents other clips in which Benitez’s alleged relative describes with extreme coldness the suicide, of which the footballer himself was a spectator. Anabelia’s tablet and cell phone are in the hands of Justice and will be examined to establish whether the WhatsApp story is realif the broadcast had been seen by another device, that of the former Boca footballer.

The one who was imprisoned was Anabelia. Benítez monitored her 24 hours a day with that application. She always had to be within reach of the camera, if she disappeared, an alarm would have sounded for Benitez. And this made him angry.

“We had already gotten used to eating and her with the tablet in front of her. If she heard a voice she didn’t recognize, she would have to show her who she was. “The cousins, when they came to visit them, had to sit behind the tablet and keep quiet: he listened to everything.”summarizes Cecilia, the mother who cries and collapses.

Benítez, despite his mediocre spell at Boca, got his first international transfer and went to Mexico, where he wore the shirt of Atlético San Luis. Anabelia went there and sent signals from there with the intention of returning. But he had neither money nor passport: the footballer had withheld it from him. She was his slave.

With the same script of relationships in which one party subjugates the other, there was continuity despite the beatings. He hid the bites with his hair, in the summer he could wear a sweater so as not to see the bruises, and he moved slowly because Benítez really liked punching him in the ribs.

It is very easy for third parties to agree that separation is the definitive solution. It is extremely difficult to achieve such a thing in such a distorted context and in which the fear of consequences overcomes one’s body. The magic solution that everyone in the family was waiting for without saying it was for Benitez to fall in love with another woman.

Benítez was arrested in May last year for a combination of things. At the beginning of 2021, José and Cecilia, her parents, found the player in her daughter’s room with a firearm that she had placed on the bedside table, while she broke several of her things. In early 2022, the complaint from the woman’s father, mother and brother was due to the fact that Benítez had punctured the tires of a family truck with a knife in front of his front door.

The cover of the case appears as suicide. The family hopes that the data, the complaints, the sentences will be cross-referenced and it will be proven that Benitez did not prevent Anabelia from hanging herself and that it was murder. “He’s a psychopath”the mother emphasizes.

For the funeral procession, José requested one of the buses of the company where he works as a driver. Above 543, the neighbors went to say goodbye to Anabelia for the last time. On Wednesday they gathered at home closer than goodbye to demand justice. The Ayala don’t appear to be alone.

The false calm after the denunciation

“I really believe in instinct, in human instinct, because instinct is something inside you that says ‘this here, there is something strange, that shouldn’t be there’ and you have to listen to instinct, because if it is speaking the unconscious, pay attention to it”he says and recommends that parents experience a situation similar to the one their daughter did not experience.

After the arrest Benitez continued to listen to his instincts. He called home every day to ask about his daughter.

“Three or four times a day I called home because you saw when they say everything is very quiet, is there something wrong?” Well, I noticed that after all the reporting everything was very calm and they said: “something will happen, something will happen, something will happen”. And he was careful, but he went after me because I didn’t expect my daughter to hang herself. I didn’t expect her to kill me, but I expected that I could stop when faced with a situation that had slipped into her hands. “She hit me from behind.”the Mint.

Ayala’s house is full of neighbors. That’s pretty much the entire neighborhood. Everyone, except Benítez’s relatives, those who did not toast New Year’s Eve and did nothing to prevent Anabelia’s hanging. Agustín, her brother, was the one who knocked on her door at midnight and the one who found her lifeless the following noon.

“Coming in and seeing her like that is something I will never erase from my mind. Just as I remember her very well too because I keep in mind that my sister is not that person who has been there for the last five years. At that moment she was behind a shell of fear, strength, pain, courage… It hurts me a lot that she ended up like this, because she deserved a lot. She was beautiful, she was very intelligent, she had a huge heart. That’s why there are so many people here: they have shown love to each of us here in their own way. “My sister was the only one.”Agustín says and controls the emotion in every syllable.

Cecilia, the mother, cannot. He is overcome with tears but he feels that he must not stop talking even if he cries. He knows in every word that his daughter is no longer there. In his words, he wants other families not to go through the same thing as him.

“I felt weak as a mother, it was just watching my daughter suffer and not being able to do anything. Dad yes, dad did everything he could, but as a mom I can’t do anything. Please take care of your girls, take care of them from the first symptom because the first thing he (ex-boyfriend Benitez) did was take her away from her friends, who are all bad, who are prostitutes… And then the cousins, even the brother. And we were giving up, you know? We gave in so they wouldn’t beat her. We feel helpless. “I wasn’t brave, I did what I could, I wasn’t brave like mom, I wasn’t brave, I was scared, fear won me.”Cecilia melts without consolation.