This Tuesday, a 20-year-old boy sat before the judge, facing the worst punishment provided for by the Spanish penal code: a permanent, verifiable prison sentence. He is the confessed perpetrator of the murder of a boy his age. The defendant’s name is David Bárcena and the victim, Isaac López Triano, was stabbed to death in a tunnel in Madrid near his home on July 14, 2021. The motives no longer make sense when it comes to a crime between teenagers, but if you have to look for one, police investigators attribute this to the war between youth gangs that left at least eight dead in Madrid between this year and 2022, two of them minors. He said it himself in his statement, in which he simply answered his lawyer’s questions: “I destroyed Isaac’s family, but also mine.”
He was not alone on the day of the crime, he was accompanied by three minors who had already been sentenced to four to six years in a reformatory for murder and for belonging to the Dominican group “Don’t Play”. The trial that Bárcena was following is that of an adult, since she had turned 18 two months before the murder. One of the men sentenced served it a month later.
David claims he drank beer and “smoked a lot of joints” on the day of the crime. He reported that he was “racing” the scooter and that they met Isaac, who reprimanded them and told him, “I shit on your dead people.” According to him, this sentence unleashed his anger: “The death of my grandmother is the worst thing that has happened to me in my life.” The defendant describes a confrontation in which Isaac also attacked him with a knife, to which he replied: “I didn’t even know where it hit.”
He claims he found out from television that the victim had died. Police believe it has been proven that Isaac was carrying a knife with an eight-centimeter blade. In his messages you read how he told a friend that when he was walking through the neighborhood he had to go out with a “filo” (knife) for fear of being attacked, and in the video surveillance cameras of his portal you can see him searching that day carefully on both sides before you leave. The main investigator in the case from Homicide Squad VI does not believe it is credible that the fight was started by one boy alone against four rivals who were also careful when leaving the house.
It wasn’t David’s fate to sit before a judge under the threat of a life sentence, nor was Isaac’s fate to bleed to death in a tunnel. The defendant was born in Boadilla del Monte in 2003, but his place of residence is Villaverde. Her mother is a hairdresser and David helped her at work, her lawyer said on the first day of the trial, and her father is a teacher for children with disabilities, he said in his statement today.
As a child he suffered from bullying and when his imprisonment ended, the “bad company” began, he dropped out and did not complete secondary school, his lawyer also explained. Isaac was a fatherless boy with a 46% disability due to Asperger’s syndrome who began to stand out for his rapping and spent his days between cockfights (improvised musical duels) in the park near his home. There was no reason for there to be hatred between them and for their paths to cross in this fatal way.
What influences the most is what happens next. So you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe to
The trail that led investigators to those arrested was the trail left by three scooters they had rented that afternoon. Several witnesses told agents how one group of boys chased another in these vehicles, and that was the thread we were able to start with. Researchers identified the company that owned them and gave them a name, initials and email address. The initials were DBG, those of the defendant, who now faces a permanent, criminal prison sentence. He had logged into the app that same day to rent these scooters.
The adult accused of the crime of Isaac López Triano.EL PAÍS
Thanks to the devices’ geolocation system, the police were able to trace their route. The points displayed by the system integrated into the scooters matched the images from the surveillance cameras at gas stations, savings banks and other facilities in the city. There, with the map before their eyes, they realized that they had left the Embajadores neighborhood in the center of the city and traveled to Pacífico, Isaac’s neighborhood, where they found him.
The investigation hasn’t clarified whether they were after him or whether they found him by chance, but on the cell phone of one of the underage detainees there was a video from a few days ago in which someone insulted Isaac and one of his friends on a bus climb. Who returns from Parla to Madrid. The friend seen with Isaac in the video is the same friend he was talking to on his cell phone the day he was murdered. “Leave me!” was the last thing his colleague heard on the other end of the line. Isaac was accused of having ties to the Trinitarios gang.
The ride of the scooters and the statements of the witnesses indicate that the group of attackers chased Isaac, they all reached the end of the tunnel and turned around, the victim fell to the ground and this was the moment he was stabbed by him back . The attackers fled in the opposite direction and had to avoid several cars. Based on the GPS signal, the group stopped at a nearby park a few minutes later. When police went to that area with bushes to find out why they had stopped, they found two hidden knives. One of them with remnants of Isaac’s blood and fibers.
The investigation also looked at the dynamics of the group to which the perpetrators of the crime belonged. This is a group of minors from the Dominican Don’t Play from the Embajadores district. From the news it appears that one of the already convicted minors was in charge. They organized themselves into different WhatsApp groups, in which some talked more and others warned: “Don’t talk about it here.” “What rank do I have?” Bárcena is said to have asked another member in another chat.
One day one of the choir members announces in a chat that he will be less active in the band because the police took two knives from him and his aunt told his mother. “Loko (sic), I’m going to be cold (less active in the band) because I don’t want to have any problems now, and when I’m 18 I’m going to be worried like they’re going to put me in prison,” he writes . The ringleader replies: “My crazy, they put me in jail three times, my mother caught me with machetes and guns and I’m still the same.” Ten months later, the boy who wanted to “stay cold” in the band, murdered by a group of Trinitarios as he had just left the house. He had turned 18 six months ago.
On November 25, 2021, police officers were deployed at four different points to arrest the four suspected perpetrators at the same time. Bárcena admitted to being the perpetrator of the stabbing. In the defendant’s house they found a machete and a knife, which were shown this Tuesday in the provincial court room. Some weapons that describe the atmosphere of violence unleashed in a crime between teenagers who barely knew each other.
Subscribe to our daily newsletter about Madrid here.