Laurence Dollimore
THE autopsy carried out on Gabriel Ruiz has revealed he was strangled to death.
The eight-year-old boy died on February 27, the same day he disappeared.
It comes after his body was found in the boot of his stepmother Ana Julia Quezada’s car.
She remains the prime suspect in the case after she was found trying to move the body on Sunday.
The 43-year-old, from the Dominican Republic, left Nijar on Sunday morning, when she was followed by police, who already suspected her of being involved in the boy’s disappearance.
She left the boy’s father, Angel Cruz, at a hotel in Las Negras, driving to Rodalquilar, a town 7km away.
She entered a farm owned by the family, known as La Cañada de la Soledad.
Here police watched her pulling the body of a child wrapped in a blanket from a well and put it in her car boot.
She then drove 74 kilometres to Puebla de Vicar, where she had been living with Gabriel’s father.
She was finally arrested by Guardia Civil officers as she tried to enter the garage.
Police are now trying to piece together what happened around the time Gabriel left his grandmother’s home to play with his cousins just 100 metres away – but never arrived.
His grandmother and Ana Julia, who was also in Las Hortichuelas house that afternoon, were the last ones to see him alive.
Patricia Ramírez, the mother of little Gabriel, has asked on Monday to stop the messages of rage against the detainee.
“I do not want everything to end with the rage that this woman has sown, Gabriel does not deserve it,” she has asked in Onda Cero’s Más de Uno programme.
Ramírez also thanked the support and messages of affection she has received since the child disappeared: “Although there was no happy ending, the fish is swimming towards the sky,” she added.
After the detention of Quezada, the police are reviewing an old case.
A four-year-old daughter of Quezada who died after falling through a window 22 years ago in Burgos, in 1996.
The death of the girl was then investigated and it was concluded that it was an accident.
At that time, Ana Julia was 21 years old and lived in the well-known neighborhood of Gamonal with her husband, with whom she had a two-year-old daughter, and with the deceased minor, whom the man had adopted.
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