Alleged Murderer of Two Women in Cienfuegos Commits Suicide

A strong police presence accompanied the buriel of the alleged murdered of two women in Cienfuegos (Justo Mora)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Justo Mora / Mario J. Pentón, Cienfuegos/Miami, 5 December 2018 — Rafael Garcia, alleged perpetrator of the double femicide that shook Cienfuegos last May, committed suicide on the eve of his trial, scheduled for Wednesday, several sources close to the family confirmed to 14ymedio.

The tension was thick in the air in the morning hours in the vicinity of the funeral home in the city where Garcia’s body was being prepared for burial. Policemen, relatives, friends and dozens of onlookers filled the crowded Prado Street.

“He hanged himself because he was sorry for what he did and did not want to see the faces of the relatives of the victims, he called his family from prison to tell them that he could not live there,” a neighbor of Garcia told this newspaper.

Last May, Tomasa Causse Fabat, a 64-year-old nurse, and her daughter Daylín Najarro Causse, 36, died of knife wounds inflicted by García, the younger woman’s former husband and the elder woman’s former son-in-law.

According to residents of the neighborhood of San Lazaro, where the events took place, around noon on the day of the murders Causse Fabat began shouting outside her home. Seeing her bleeding, a neighbor came to help. At that moment the daughter crossed the street and took refuge in another house to escape her ex-husband who was chasing her with a knife. He had already stabbed her multiple times in the womb. The assailant pursued her there and continued stabbing her. Then he cut her throat before the terrified eyes of the witnesses.

Causse Fabat died a few hours later in the same room where she had served as a nurse.

Najarro Causse had been married to the man that all the witnesses identified as her murderer and with whom she had a five-year-old girl. At the time of her death, she was three months pregnant by another partner.

Adrián Najarro, son and brother of the victims, told 14ymedio that Garcia’s death “does not give the family peace.”

“All this has been very hard for me, first because justice could not be done and it has stirred up the memory of everything that I experienced with my mother and my sister, and then because my niece is now also orphaned of a father,” he added.

García had been detained for alleged lascivious touching of his daughter and had just completed a year in prison when he committed the crime, explained Najarro.

“The girl herself said that her father abused her, but since they did not find evidence, they only sentenced him to one year and six months in prison for a misdemeanor, something like exhibitionism,” lamented the relatives of the victims in a previous conversation with 14ymedio.

The girl has been living in the east of the country, to get away from the tragedy, said Najarro.

The trial against Rafael García was cancelled due to his death, but the official press has not yet reported the news.

Last year Cienfuegos was the scene of several crimes that shook the 150,000 inhabitants of the city. In February, Luis Santacruz Labrada, 23, died at the hands of a minor.

In October 2017 the young Leidy Maura Pacheco Mur, aged 18, was raped by three men who later killed her. The trial was held amid extraordinary security measures and two of the murderers were sentenced to life imprisonment and a third to 30 years in prison.

The Cuban government does not publish official figures on violent acts on the island and crimes are rarely addressed by the official press. Mariela Castro, daughter of former Cuban President Raúl Castro and president of the National Center for Sex Education (Cenesex), said in January this year that there were no femicides in Cuba and that this was an “achievement of the Revolution” led by her father and her uncle in 1959.

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