A 32-year-old man, who claimed he was only trying to restrain his former girlfriend from hitting him when he accidentally asphyxiated her, has been found guilty of her murder and remanded in custody for sentence.<\/p>\n
Miller Pacheco, a Brazilian engineer whose full name is Miller Mizerani da Cunha Belo Pacheco, had denied the murder of Bruna Fonseca (28), a librarian, at his apartment at Liberty Street in Cork on January 1st, 2023.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, the jury of five men and seven women took just one hour and two minutes to find him guilty of Ms Fonseca\u2019s murder. Evidence had been heard from over 30 witnesses in the nine-day trial at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Cork.<\/p>\n
There were emotional scenes in court six at the Anglesea St Courthouse when the verdict was returned, with Ms Fonseca\u2019s sisters Izabel and Fernanda, her cousin Marcela and niece Maria all breaking into tears and embracing each other.<\/p>\n
Prosecution counsel, Bernard Conlon SC, said Ms Fonseca\u2019s family had victim-impact statements prepared and he asked for the matter to be finalised on Friday as some had come from Brazil. Ms Justice Siobhan Lankford remanded Pacheco for sentence on Friday.<\/p>\n
Pacheco did not give evidence during the trial but memos of his interviews with garda\u00ed were read into evidence. The jury heard how he claimed he was trying to restrain Ms Fonseca from hitting him when he caught her in a choke hold around the neck. <\/p>\n
The couple had been in a relationship for five years in Brazil but split up in December 2021. They got back together shortly before Ms Fonesca came to Ireland in September 2022, with Pacheco coming to Ireland in November 2022. However, they split up again within a matter of days.<\/p>\n
Pacheco had gone to the Oyster Tavern on New Year\u2019s Eve after she told him she was going there. He spent the evening following her around and filming her as she danced with and kissed another man. At the end of this night, Pacheco invited her back to his apartment.<\/p>\n
He explained she had agreed to come back to his apartment so that they could FaceTime his family back in Brazil who were looking after their dog, D\u2019eagle. However, he said a row broke out and she began hitting him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen she hit me, I got lost in my head,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was as if it was not me. I am not an aggressive person. I never wanted to harm her. I tried to immobilise her; I just wanted fighting to be over. I did not want to harm her. In this fraction of seconds, I wanted her to stop hitting me. <\/p>\n
\u201cShe fell between the bed and the table. I fell on her. I got a chance to stop her fighting. I did something I saw on TV. When I done this move, she slowly stopped . . . I let her go . . . I did not mean to kill her. I am not this monster. I am not that person who kills someone I love.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margot Bolster gave evidence that she found over 65 external and internal bruises on Ms Fonseca\u2019s body. There were bruises on her head, torso and limbs, as well as bruises on her neck, which Dr Bolster believed were significant.<\/p>\n
\u201cExtensive bruising is in keeping with manual strangulation, with a hand constraining the neck \u2013 fingers on the left side, thumb on the right side. It would have been done with the right hand,\u201d said Dr Bolster, adding in cross-examination she did not believe the bruises were due to a choke hold.<\/p>\n
She said she would have expected a broader pattern of injuries from a choke hold using the forearm and bicep. \u201cNever say never. You can never outrule anything but, in my view, it is much more typical of a manual strangulation rather than a choke hold from the pattern of injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n
The jury also heard evidence from Sgt Brian Barron that Pacheco texted his sister, Millena, in Brazil just before midnight on December 19th, 2022. In the text, he asked her to look after their dog before telling her: \u201cI\u2019ve kind of decided what I will do and I won\u2019t tell anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sgt Barron said that Pacheco did not expand on what he meant by that comment. However, the analysis of his phone showed that five minutes later, he visited a website entitled How to kill in Three Seconds, which gave details of the massacre of a Brazilian family in Spain.<\/p>\n
The analysis also revealed that just three minutes after that, there was a visit to another website \u2013 \u201cWhat are the necessary conditions to kill someone\u201d \u2013 and just a minute after that, there was a visit to another on \u201cThree ways to fight well with knives\u201d.<\/p>\n
Defence counsel Ray Boland SC said it was his instructions that his client was searching how to kill someone in relation to taking his own life and he wanted to find out the cost of repatriating a body to Brazil. Sgt Barron confirmed Pacheco had performed three searches on body-repatriation costs.<\/p>\n
The jury also heard evidence of texts and conversations between Ms Fonseca and Pacheco in which she told him their relationship was over and that he needed to get psychiatric help after he repeatedly told her he was going to kill himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 32-year-old man, who claimed he was only trying to restrain his former girlfriend from hitting him when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1347,46,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-258398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-brazil","9":"tag-cork","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-top-news","13":"tag-top-stories","14":"tag-topnews","15":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}