“I am the one who manages the house. She is here, but she has no knowledge of the facts,” said the defendant during the opening session of the retrial, which commenced today at the Aveiro Court.
The 64-year-old man and his 55-year-old wife are charged with two counts of negligent homicide and one count of negligent physical harm, each related to incidents that occurred between January and February 2019.
At the start of the retrial, mandated by the Court of Appeal, the defendant expressed regret for what happened to the victims and insisted he believed the water heater in the rented room where the incidents occurred was properly installed.
“When I hired people to do the installation, I fully trusted their work because they assured me it was in order. From that moment, I was at ease,” he stated, unable to identify who actually installed the equipment.
The defendant further claimed that the room had been occupied by several people, including the defendants themselves, without incident, lamenting that after the first death, they were not alerted to any issue with the water heater.
“If we had been informed, none of this would have happened (…). We only learned the cause of death when the Judiciary Police called us and named us as defendants,” he said.
The defendant also mentioned that at the time, he associated the two deaths with drug use in one case and lack of nutrition and use of weight-loss medication in another.
In September 2024, the defendants were sentenced by the Aveiro Court to a cumulative two-year prison sentence, suspended. The suspension was contingent on the defendants proving, within two months, that the property was certified for gas installation.
Besides the prison sentence, the defendants were also ordered to pay more than 185,000 euros in compensation to the victims’ families, in addition to hospital expenses.
The incidents took place between January and February 2019, in a house located in Aveiro, which had previously operated as an illegal nursing home. In less than a month, two people died, and a third suffered irreversible physical damage after inhaling carbon monoxide due to a poorly installed water heater.
The court relied on expert evidence showing that the water heater “did not meet the necessary safety and ventilation conditions,” with the exterior opening obstructed by a grill, which the defendants were aware of.
The court deemed the water heater installation “absolutely abnormal and senseless,” lacking any certification, especially considering the person responsible for the installation was employed as a gravedigger.
The judge also noted that the lack of proper conditions was documented in a Social Security report that justified the urgent closure of the care home previously operating in the same space before this case.
