Sallent is in shock. On Tuesday at noon, two 12-year-old girls fell from a third floor balcony after climbing onto chairs, and having previously left a handwritten note that was found by the local police officers of this central Catalonia municipality. The twin sisters fell to the street. One of them died immediately and the other was transferred in a very serious condition, by helicopter, to the Parc Taulí hospital in Sabadell, where she remains in a very serious but stable condition.
The Mossos police, after the clear signs found by the local officers, ruled out any act of criminality from the outset and began an investigation along two clear lines: an accident, or a voluntary jump. The signs found, however, quickly focused the investigation on a possible joint suicide attempt by the two sisters.
The Mossos do not rule out bullying
Police investigations, however, are also trying to identify a possible motivation. One of the hypotheses under investigation was whether the two girls were victims of school bullying or of any possible abuse by their classmates. The Catalan education department, as reported this Wednesday morning, ruled this out, and informs that the two girls were undergoing psychological treatment, but that they had not detected, from the school centre or from the municipal police, any complaint or comment referring to possible bullying against the two sisters. For its part, the Sallent municipal council has published a statement along the same lines, denying the possibility of school bullying and asking that false rumours not be spread.
The investigation, however, remains open and the Mossos are not ruling anything out. The Catalan police are analyzing the lives of the two adolescents to clarify whether or not they were victims of harassment and whether this could have motivated their action. Right now, with the Catalan police still to close their report and deliver it to the judge, there are details that make the Mossos investigators consider the possibility that an episode at school could have influenced the two minors in their action, which, according to all signs, appears to be a tragic attempt to take their own lives on Tuesday at noon in Sallent.
Some relatives of the two girls, however, have explained in statements to the media that the twins had indeed received insults at the primary school they had gone to, and also at the high school where they were now enrolled. A man who claimed to be a relative of the girls' parents explained that the girls had received insults for being born in Argentina and that they had already received psychological assistance. However, he stated that he did not know what was written in the letter that the two girls left behind. The Mossos insist that the investigation remains wide open and that they do not rule out, as the education department has done, that the two girls could have suffered some sort of harassment, even though the school had not detected it, or if no-one had reported it.
Family with financial problems
The family, from Argentina, had settled in Sallent, in the Bages county, two years ago, and they lived in a block of flats where many of the homes are squatted and with the electricity illegally connected, and neighbours asserted that this was the case with the flat where the girls lived. Their family was in financial difficulties and was receiving attention from the social services. At the time of the events, the father was at home and the mother was absent, at work. In addition to these two daughters, they also have a younger son.
The municipality's primary health centre activated the protocol to provide psychological support to the family on Tuesday afternoon and today psychologists from the Medical Emergency System were deployed to also support colleagues and professionals at the school. The municipality suspended its Carnival celebrations yesterday and decreed three days of mourning. The mayor of the town of about 7,000 inhabitants, Oriol Ribalta, asked to "put the false information to one side so that we can focus on the people who really need it right now". In any case, in Sallent, no one can explain what happened.