|
 The Brazilian police say they have solved a macabre crime involving a rapist and a one and a half year old girl, who after being raped was thrown in the baptismal font of an Adventist church in Joinville, a small town in the southern state of Santa Catarina.
Gabrielli Cristina Eichholz, was violated and strangled on March 3, during the church's Saturday services. According to authorities, the murderer is Oscar Gonçalves do Rosário, a 22-year-old jobless mason who has confessed to the crime that shocked Brazil and the world.
When arrested in Canoinhas, at 7 in the morning, while sleeping at his parents house, about 200 miles from the place where he committed the crime, Rosário didn't try to react or to escape. He has other three siblings, all of them minors. Later, in the police bureau, he said that he couldn't recall exactly what happened that day because he was drunk.
While the police had initially suspected that the murderer was someone who knew the little girl and was a church faithful many leads ended up at a dead end. Rosário was among the suspects from the start because he had arrived in December in Joinville looking for a job and had left town the same day of the crime.
Rodrigo Gusso, the police chief in charge of the investigations, informed that the suspect had been booked previously by the police for theft and was also suspect of molesting two girls who were about 9 years old. At that time, the mothers of the girls decided not to press charges and nothing was done against the offender.
Authorities say that Rosário seemed very cold and didn't show any emotion while telling his story. The mason told police that he was drunk that Saturday morning and was walking on the street when he saw the little girl by herself in the church's patio.
He said that he followed her when she went back into the temple. Police believe the rape occurred inside the men's bathroom. The man said that he didn't know the church and had no idea that the tank where he left the girl was for baptism. He thought it was just a bathtub.
Authorities are afraid somebody will try to kill Rosário before he can be brought to justice. The mason arrived at the Joinville police bureau accompanied by 20 policemen and 4 police chiefs. He left the police car wearing a hood in the middle of several hooded policemen. Fearing for his security, the police are not telling in which prison he is going to be held.
Gabrielli had been taken by relatives to the Saturday's services and left in a room to play with other children who were being overseen by church's employees. Apparently she left the room without been notice by the woman that should be caring for her.
Felipe Lemos, a church spokesman, said that all parishioners were extremely mortified: "Everybody is in shock. Nothing like that ever happened in any of our churches all around the world," he said soon after the murder.
Gabrielli's mother, Andréia Pereira Eichholz, had told reporters that she felt no hatred in her heart: "I can't understand how something like that could happen inside a church. I want to know who grabbed my daughter. I don't feel any anger or hate. I just want to understand why."
"I have no more tears," she told Joinville's newspaper, A Notícia. "They dried up. I prefer to think that my daughter drowned. It hurts less. She was a sweet girl, always smiling. Everyone was drawn to her beauty."
The mother says she allowed Gabrielli to go with her cousin and her boyfriend because the girl loved to be with them. Both have been living with Gabrielli's parents for four months. Saturday when they were leaving to the church - Andréia goes to another evangelical church, the Assembly of God - the girl started to cry to go with them. The mother saw no problem.
Márcia Machado, the cousin, informed the day after the incident: "She was going to stay with us during the services. But one of teachers asked to take her to the playing room and we authorized it."
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/northamptonshire/6447253.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/6446757.stm
US
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6152118.stm
AFRICA
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9500E7DE133AF93AA15752C0A9649C8B63
everywhere...
These crimes call for the death penalty - NO EXCEPTION - NO REHAB - NO COWARDICE
There is no room in prison, in rehab, in this life period for these kind of monsters.
At least in the Braziian case, I am confident that guy will be rightfully killed.