A Spanish teenager has received a six-year jail sentence for murdering his parents and brother because he was punished for poor school grades.
The 15-year-old shot his mother with his grandfather’s hunting rifle before turning the weapon on his younger sibling and father after being banned from using the internet or watching television.
He lived with their bodies for several days at the family home in La Algoda, near the Costa Blanca town of Elche, south of Alicante, before the horrific crime was discovered.
On Saturday it emerged the triple teen killer, named only as Santi for legal reasons, had been sentenced to six years in custody and another three years of probation for the crime, which took place earlier this year.
He is expected to serve most of his sentence, the maximum possible under Spanish law for a boy of his age, in a closed young offender institution before being transferred to an adult prison.
Local reports said he had confessed to carrying out the murders, which took place on 8 February, during a trial which took place behind closed doors due to the involvement of a minor.
If he had been a year older when he committed his crimes, he could have been handed a ten-year custodial sentence.
The youngster told specialists after his arrest he had acted in a fit of rage after being left without a computer or television, as well as being banned from going out with his friends and made to help with domestic chores.
He shot his brother Gonzalo in the back as he tried to flee after killing his mum Encarni – and hid their bodies in a storeroom before using the weapon to murder his father Jaime when he returned home later the same day.
His injured father managed to wrestle the weapon out of his hands and throw it on the ground, before the teenage killer retrieved the rifle and fired off two more shots.
He spent the next three days in his room playing video games, posing as a relative to call his school and lie that he had Covid to buy time.
He finally confessed after his concerned aunts turned up at the family home.
Psychiatrists and other experts who interviewed him after his arrest ruled out any mental illness and said in a report he knew what he had done and recounted it with ‘coldness and no regret.’
Reports at the time of the killings said the ‘shy’ student had read a book on his school reading list about a 16-year-old who murders his father and wounds two of his three siblings.
