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shoot you!” Her son told her that the inmates didn’t have water inside their cellblock
as the water valve had been shut.
Sergio David died two days after the fire. When her son died, the witness retrieved
his body and buried him. A brother-in-law who works at the Ministry of Justice and
Labor bought the coffin; her family paid the other expenses.
From the time her son was incarcerated in the Center, she lost her entire family,
since Sergio David needed attention. She no longer had friends or friendships,
because she devoted all her time to Sergio. Everyone in the family suffered; they
grieved at the time he was detained and are still grieving today. They have still not
managed to recover everything they lost with Sergio, from the time of his detention
to the time of his death; for that reason, she cannot hire a professional to treat her
other children and does not have the means to send them to university.
The Center was not a very large place, yet it housed over 600 youngsters. The food
was “inedible,” which was why the witness brought her son food and money to pay a
guard to treat him “a little better.” The Center was not a correctional institution; it
was a place that kept the inmates “like animals.” The cell was approximately two
meters and held over thirty youngsters. The inmates were inside all day and were
only let out for breakfast, lunch and supper. Visitors to the Center were patted down
and undressed to see if they were carrying anything with them. When she went to
visit her son, they always told her that he had been punished, that he didn’t get
along with the guard or that he was on his way to the punishment room. Concerning
the punishments, her son told her that there were “times that even the best behaved
[was] punished; the guards h[ung] the stronger inmates upside down for hours,
[with] the head down and the feet up in the air, hanging by the legs.” When the
inmates got out of there, their dizziness caused them to stumble and hurt
themselves. That treatment, the witness said, was inhumane.
Sergio suffered pains in his head, back and around his waistline; she always brought
him some medication. Her son once caught scabies. No physician ever treated him;
she was his doctor. They warned her that she was not allowed to bring in much
medication.
Because of his situation and because she realized that her son “was no longer a
normal boy,” the witness hired a private psychologist for him. The psychologist
visited him at the Center three times a week for a four-month period, until his death.
She filed a civil suit against the State that is closed “until other people are able to
get the case moving.”
She did not ask the Court for anything for her deceased son; she asked the Court to
do something for her surviving children, because they have been badly affected, as
has she; nothing can relieve the pain that the loss of a child causes. She also asked
the Court to help those who were abused and who were burned in the fire at the
Center. She asked that the Paraguayan justice system be impartial, humane, and
treat “everyone as equals.”
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