A devastated mom was handed a jail sentence after she burnt her daughter’s rapist alive following his release from prison.Spanish woman María del Carmen García’s daughter Verónica was just 13 years old when she was raped at knifepoint by her neighbor Antonio Cosme in 1998. The rapist was sentenced to nine years in prison for the crime but in June 2005 he was on day release when he approached María at a bus stop near her home outside of Alicante.
Cosme showed no remorse for his sickening crime and even taunted María as he asked “how her daughter was”. Cosme then went into a local bar María’s family frequented.
In the meantime, María, who had been left feeling a combination of rage, fear and hysteria over his question, went to a nearby petrol station and purchased a container of fuel.
She entered the bar Cosme was at, poured the gasoline over his head and set her daughter’s rapist alight. Cosme suffered burns over 90% of his body and died in hospital days later.
María was reportedly found wandering around the port on the evening of the killing and confessed. She claimed she’d intended to scare or badly injure him to give him an idea of what he put her daughter through.María was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in jail for the killing, which was later reduced to five-and-a-half years on appeal. The mother’s case garnered sympathy from across the country and there was a huge effort to keep her out of prison
Petitions received thousands of signatures, medical records showed she’d been experiencing severe depression and anxiety, numerous appeals were made and a request was even made for her to be included in Spain’s Easter reprieve list.In 2011, after she’d served a total of one year and 10 days in prison, a court agreed to suspend her sentence pending an application for an official pardon, citing “special circumstances” and taking into account the she had no previous criminal record and had pleaded insanity at the time of the offense.
However, in 2013 María returned to prison after the regional high court of Alicante rejected a plea by her lawyer to order a stay on her imprisonment after the Spanish government denied her request for a partial pardon. In 2017 María was granted the ability to leave the prison between the hours of 11am and 7pm before her release in 2018.
