A 56-year-old man has been arrested for the alleged murder of his 15-year-old girlfriend, authorities in the northeastern Brazilian city of Monteiro announced.
Gilson Cruz is suspected of shooting Maria dos Santos during an argument at his home on Sunday and immediately fleeing the state of Paraiba.
However, authorities were able to track the movement of his vehicle through traffic cameras and apprehend him 187 miles away in Caruaru, a city in the nearby state of Pernambuco.
Paraiba Civil Police detective, Savio Siqueira, told Brazilian news outlet G1 that Cruz and dos Santos were drinking when he fired his weapon at her.
‘He shot more than once,’ he said. ‘He made sure he actually hit her in a way. That there was no way she could survive.’
The teen’s mother, Maria Lucia dos Santos, told law enforcement investigators that Cruz first met her daughter almost two years ago after he hired her to work at his bakery.
She told police that she found out that Cruz was allegedly having sex with the minor after he moved her into his home.
The family was aware that Cruz allegedly physically abused Maria dos Santos and reported the incident to the police, but Siqueira said that authorities didn’t have any incident reports on file.
G1 obtained a copy of the audio of a message sent by the teenager to her mother in which she claimed Cruz hit her in the face with a gun.
‘He’s tried to do a lot of things to me, right? Like, he threw a gun at my face, blew my head off, then I had to go to the emergency room and get stitches, a lot of things,’ Maria dos Santos said.
The teen, however, didn’t call the police because she was afraid of the repercussions.
‘But I never had the courage to report him. Like, you know, the courage to hurt him and my parents, you know?’ dos Santos said in the audio.
Maria Lucia dos Santos told TV Paraíba that she was planning on traveling from her home in São Paulo to take her daughter back.
‘She wanted to get out. she tried. She studied at one school all day, and then went to another. And she couldn’t, because he was messing everything up,’ she said.
‘There were times when she couldn’t talk because she was afraid, I could tell she was afraid during the phone call.’
Maria Lucia dos Santos said that Cruz often broke her daughter’s cell phones and she once spotted bite marks on her daughter’s hands.
She said that Cruz would often call her via video while he was with her daughter in bed.
‘He didn’t respect me, he would make video calls so I could see him with her in bed, and then I would hang up,’ Maria Lucia dos Santos said. ‘She said he was the one who forced me to see all of this. He did this to destroy us.’