Prosecutor Seeks 52 Years for Jordi Magentí in Susqueda Double Murder

The Fiscalía Provincial de Girona (the provincial prosecutor’s office) is asking for 52 years in prison for Jordi Magentí, the only suspect ever named in the killing of Marc Hernández and Paula Mas at the Susqueda reservoir on Aug. 24, 2017. Prosecutor Jerónimo Enrique Gómez wants a popular jury to try him at the Audiencia de Girona (the provincial court), according to El Caso.

The prosecutor seeks 25 years for each murder and two more for illegal possession of a weapon, followed by ten years of supervised release, La Vanguardia reported. Magentí’s lawyer, Benet Salellas, will ask for an acquittal on the grounds that no evidence points to his client, ABC said.

What the prosecution says happened at the reservoir

Marc, 23, and Paula, 21, had spent the night near the reservoir and came back that morning in Paula’s Opel Zafira, planning to inflate Marc’s kayak and go out on the water. According to the indictment, Magentí, an Anglès resident who had hunted and fished the area for years, drove there in a white Land Rover Defender and arrived at about 9:36 a.m. Security cameras in the area recorded his vehicle. The prosecutor says the three had never met.

The prosecution’s account is that Magentí met the couple at the water’s edge while they were inflating the kayak and shot them with a handgun from between 1 and 3 metres away. Paula was shot once in the head and died instantly. Marc was hit at least four times in the chest and abdomen, and one bullet passed through his left hand. The indictment does not establish who was shot first or what set off the attack.

After the shooting, prosecutors say, he sank the car and the two bodies at separate spots in the reservoir and tried to sink the kayak at a third, to delay the discovery and get rid of evidence. The bodies were found floating almost a month later.

The evidence against Magentí

No fingerprints, DNA, images or phone signals tie Magentí to the killings, ABC reported, and because the bodies spent weeks in the water, investigators could not identify the type of bullet used. The case is built on circumstantial evidence. The prosecutor points to his detailed knowledge of the reservoir, including a spot where the water gets deeper and a car would stay out of sight. Geological and mineral tests compared stones used to weigh down a backpack tied to Marc’s body, the car and the kayak with rock from La Rierica, the area where Magentí usually fished and where he told a court he had been that morning.

The case file also contains phone taps, a technical report on his Google searches and evidence that he looked up flights to Colombia right after the killings, La Vanguardia said. He has a diagnosed mixed depressive and personality disorder, but forensic doctors concluded it did not affect his ability to understand and decide at the time.

Prosecutors also cite his record. In 2000, the Audiencia de Girona sentenced him to fifteen years for shooting dead his wife in Anglès in 1997, and the prosecutor wants the aggravating factor of reoffending applied to both murders.

The defense case

Salellas has said that between 200 and 300 people were at Susqueda that day and that the Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalonia’s police) dropped other lines of inquiry to concentrate on his client. ABC described the scene as hard to investigate: a large wooded area with many people coming and going, where the ruins at La Rierica appear and disappear with the water level.

Magentí was arrested on Feb. 26, 2018. Court number 2 in Santa Coloma de Farners ordered him held in custody on March 1 and released him in December of that year, after about ten months, for lack of solid evidence.

What it means for the trial

The 52-page indictment sets out the prosecution’s provisional conclusions and lists the witnesses and evidence it wants put before the jury. One request is a jury visit to the reservoir, guided by a police officer, a rural agent or a local resident who knows it well. The route would include the playa de los Muertos, where the sunken Opel Zafira was found, Mas Llomà, where the kayak was floating, the place where the bodies surfaced and the ruins at La Rierica.

The prosecutor also wants Magentí to compensate the parents of both victims, with the amount set by whatever the families’ lawyers claim. The private prosecution representing the families had not yet filed its own indictment, according to ABC. A trial date has not been announced.

Sources: ABC, La Vanguardia, El Caso