It should have been a blessed weekend in the devoutly Christian western town of Benque Viejo but a most cursed omen was visited on Benque Viejo Town as a fifteen year old girl was found dead outside the town's abandoned Nazarene Church. She had been strangled to death, police say, by her much older boyfriend, a 23 year old. How did it all come to this? Alfonso Noble found out more.
Alfonso Noble Reporting, [alfnoble@yahoo.com]
The body of 15-year-old Guatemalan national Anna Aldana was found here on the corridor of this abandoned Nazarene Church in Benque Viejo town. The church sits immediately in front of where she lived. A family member who wished to not appear on camera says the last they know of Anna is that she had gone out with friends.
Claudina Tun,
"She went out at 9 on Sunday morning. People say they saw her swimming in the river and she came home when I was resting. She changed her clothes and went out again. She did not come back in the afternoon the following day when she was found. I was asking around and people told me they saw her in the park with some friends. We didn't expect this we thought we would find her alive."
The discovery was as unexpected for the girl's family as it was for the family of the man accused of the killing. Claudina Tun is the grandmother of the accused Israel Contreras Tun and she saw the body as it lay on the corridor of the old church.
Claudina Tun,
"She was lying down with her face up. There was a policeman there looking at the scene to see but they said there was no blood there was nothing. I then left because I wasn't feeling well. I was frightened because when the police came to look for him and to find out what had happened I was nervous."
Claudina says she was nervous because just minutes earlier police had come to her house looking for her grandson. She then quickly put it all together because Anna and Israel had gone to San Ignacio during the day and had returned in the night. He was under the influence of alcohol and was having a quarrel with the teen girl. As Claudina thought of the relationship today it seems she only saw the good in the young couple's relationship.
Claudina Tun,
"He had told me that his intentions were that he was going to marry her to make a family. I was happy to accept them. I can't believe there was any problem, I'm still thinking that I don't know how this could have happened. I saw that they had a good relationship. I was sure that they were going to make a good couple."
But what she thought and what actually existed are completely different stories. The relationship was wracked with problems from the beginning as Israel had been arrested and charged previously with carnal knowledge of the girl and was just out on bail when it seems this young man's emotions drove him over the edge, landing him in jail and his teenaged girlfriend in the morgue.
Tun told us that Israel's family was making arrangements to try to get the 15 year old and the 23 year old to be married. He was in fact out on bail just a few days after he had been bailed for carnally known the 15 year old.
