Tuesday, February 14, 2023 | 11:15 p.m.
The couple who were released after being wrongly accused of raping and murdering their baby in La Matanza gave details of the ill-treatment they received at the police station and their pain at not having been able to say goodbye to their daughter because they were detained for a crime that had never been existed.
Gabriel Barrientos and Layla Rivero spent five days in a police station after being accused of sexual abuse and killing their 21-day-old daughter, who died of cardiac arrest in a Ciudad Evita hospital. They were released after the autopsy determined that the newborn suffered suffocation while she was breastfed and ruled out sexual abuse and any type of mistreatment.
Barrientos and Rivero recounted that they received blows and insults and even refused to give them water at the police station.
“They beat me at the police station. They isolated me. They told me barbaric things about me and my daughter and I couldn’t do anything because I was handcuffed. I lived through an ordeal. Imagine what my partner experienced. They beat my wife from all sides, they mistreated her physically and psychologically,” said the man.
“The first two days they didn’t even give us water, I received insults all the time and they didn’t let me communicate with my family (…) they told me that people like me didn’t even deserve water,” continued the man who said he found out that his daughter had died when he was taken to the cell.
About the moment her baby suffocated, Barrientos said that she “was not breathing” and that she tried to perform CPR on her, but that the baby “did not react.” “I arrived at the hospital almost in leather and flip flops,” he explained.
Layla said it was “her first time at a police station” and that she was attacked by the other prisoners. According to her, the agents pressured her to denounce her partner for having abused the girl. “I never went against him because I knew he hadn’t done anything,” she said.
She also said that they told her that the other prisoners were going to “kill” her. “One of the prisoners kicked me in the face. And about 15 or 20 girls began to hit me, ”she recalled.
“They dirty our name all over the place. Going out scares me. My partner always searched for it and can’t get out,” the woman denounced.
The young woman also spoke of the pain of not being able to say goodbye to little Alison: “We could not say goodbye to our daughter, we could not give her our last kiss as parents.”
Why had the parents of the baby who died in La Matanza been arrested?
In principle, the authorities of the Balestrini Hospital in La Matanza assured that the baby had arrived at the hospital on Tuesday morning with a cardiac arrest and that, despite cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuvers and after being admitted to intensive care, she died a few hours.
In this context, those responsible for the pediatrics and neonatology area reported that the little girl had injuries compatible with sexual abuse.
In this way, the official Silvana Breggia, in charge of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Conflicts Derived from Family and Gender Violence and Crimes against Sexual Integrity of La Matanza, intervened, who ordered the arrest of Alison’s parents.
Both testified before the prosecutor, who charged them with the crime of “aggravated homicide by the relationship” and ordered that they continue to be detained, waiting to obtain the testimony of the doctors at the Balestrini hospital who treated the baby in the first instance.
The couple’s lawyer, Miguel Ángel Racanelli, said that “two doctors diagnosed that the baby had been sexually abused anally” and complained that “someone from the Provincial Police press assumed that this was true ”.
“The girl had hypoxia and the anus is dilated due to lack of air. And the blood that she had in her mouth and her nose was also given because of that. That is the conclusion reached by the autopsy and the report. Any doctor should realize that it is part of the reaction of the baby’s body to the lack of air, “explained the lawyer about the autopsy report that allowed the release of the parents.
Racanelli announced that now they are going to “denounce the doctors for malpractice” as well as “the Police, both the Headquarters and those who had due care.”
In addition, he stressed that “the director of the hospital came out to speak lightly that what the doctors said was true.”
