—Nines, we already have the person who murdered your son. I can’t talk much now, but I wanted you to know now.
Nines is Ángeles Triano, the mother of Isaac López, an 18-year-old boy who was stabbed to death in a Madrid tunnel in July 2021. The investigator from Homicide Group VI called her before the clock had yet struck eight in the morning. He had left the only adult defendant in the murder sitting in the back seat of the car and they were on their way to the courthouse. “It was a little relief because now you realize what happened and you stop imagining other things,” admits the victim’s mother. Since this Monday, the boy who was in the car behind the murder agent is sitting before a judge at the provincial court of Madrid to answer for the crime. According to police, David Bárcena is a proven member of the violent gang “Dominican Don’t Play” (DDP) and the one who brandished the knife that penetrated Isaac’s body, as he himself stated on the day of his arrest. The defendant is the same age as his victim would be now if he were still alive: 20 years old. Bárcena faces a permanent, appealable prison sentence.
The other three people involved, who were between 15 and 17 years old at the time of the crime, were sentenced to four to six years of closed confinement in a reformatory. “My world collapsed when I found out three of them were underage,” admits Nines. The three already convicted also accepted the crime of belonging to a criminal organization, since they were members of the DDP. One of them was actually one of the gang’s leaders, which becomes clear when you read the messages he sent to the other members, forcing them to donate money and displaying his machetes.
One of the parents of those already convicted has expressed, through the lawyer representing them, Juan Manuel Medina, his regret for what happened to Nines and has also asked to personally apologize. Something she doesn’t feel able to do at the moment: “I’m not ready to see the parents of my son’s murderers. In this story there is a victim who lost his life and that is Isaac, but he does not want to be in the place of the parents of the murdered children. They must have a hard time too. That’s what they have to live with: go shopping, go to work, tell the neighbors that your son killed someone…”
The investigation lasted four months. 120 days in which the woman wondered daily what the face of those shadows was that had attacked Isaac like a pack when the boy had just left the house. The autopsy revealed that Isaac had been stabbed four times in the back, possibly by one or more hands. After the attack, they fled on three scooters that they had rented using someone else’s card. “Isaac was threatened because he went with some friends. Police found a video of him performing with another boy who was being verbally abused. That’s why I think they had already tagged him and went after him that day,” Nines said. His son had a recognized disability due to Asperger’s syndrome. “His condition also meant that he didn’t see any danger anywhere,” he says.
From the beginning, both Nines and his lawyer Juan Manuel Medina received all sorts of rumors, about possible names, about alleged reasons why they would take action against Isaac, but the police have to work with evidence. Homicide investigators gathered so many that three of the perpetrators are already in prison and the fourth, who is in court this week, has admitted he was the perpetrator. Agents carefully collected and analyzed images of the boys on the scooters, studied telephone conversations and found Internet searches related to the crime. “What am I? “Am I a soldier now?” Bárcena asks, eager for the gang to recognize one of the minors who later accompanied him in Isaac’s crimes. Maybe he thought that by doing this he would earn those stripes Knife stabbed. In his statement to police, he stated that he had been heavily affected by drugs and alcohol that day, as well as the recent death of a family member.
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What hurts Nines most now is that he sees no remorse from either the guilty or the accused. Although he tried to stay out of it, he was able to see a video clip recorded by one of the convicted minors months after the commission of the crime, when he was released from temporary detention pending sentencing. Despite everything, she always gave a speech against hate. “It is children who kill children,” she said from the beginning and repeats it today. “Nevertheless, we cannot stop taking decisive action and pedagogy. This would be the second appealable permanent prison sentence for a gang killing. If we can ensure that there is no longer any Isaac López Triano, we will have achieved something,” supports her lawyer Juan Manuel Medina.
Recording of a video clip recorded by Bárcena, the confessed murderer of the rapper Isaac (in the foreground with the flag), and one of the minors convicted of the crime at his side.
The year 2021 and especially 2022 have been devastating due to increasing violence between the DDP and its enemy gang, the Trinitarios. Last year alone there were six deaths, two of them under the age of 15. However, this brutality has decreased in 2023, at least in terms of the number of murders, as only a single murder was recorded in the entire year. Police sources assure that the so-called anti-gang plan, launched at the end of 2021 and strengthened in 2022, has borne fruit and serious attacks have been largely neutralized.
By his mother’s definition, Isaac was an unexpected victim of this infanticide war. “I want the process to end now and to leave the tunnel behind me and to stop living in this tunnel every day,” says Nines, looking at the crime scene and also at the darkness into which her loss plunged her . Shortly afterwards she left Madrid and moved to Galicia, where her partner David is from. “For me it’s a thing of the past, I like being more isolated there, in fact I’m looking for a house even further away from a city,” she says, in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Gran Vía. It became impossible. She asks them to live in this apartment in the Pacifico district, from the window of which you can see the tunnel that Isaac went into to avoid getting out.
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