Couple Convicted of Killing 5-Year-Old Brazilian Girl

SAO PAULO – A jury has convicted a couple of murdering 5-year-old Isabella Nardoni, a crime that shook Brazil in 2008 and whose trial has been closely followed by the media and the Brazilian people.

Judge Mauricio Fossen read the sentence against the defendants after the jury of seven, four women and three men, arrived at their verdict after five days of intense debate.

When the first four jurors voted against the accused, the rest of the voting was suspended, since Brazilian law states that in such situations a simple majority rules.

Hundreds of people who followed the trial day and night, with just a few inside the courtroom, celebrated and cheered outside the Santana Forum in Sao Paulo when the judge read the sentence.

The little girl’s father, Alexandre Nardoni, was sentenced to 31 years, one month and 10 days in jail for the homicide of a child less than 14 years old and aggravated by a family relationship, plus eight additional months for the procedural fraud of attempting to alter the crime scene. The latter sentence is to be served in a semi-open prison.

The stepmother, Anna Carolina Jatoba, was sentenced for the same crimes to 26 years and eight months in jail plus another eight months in a semi-open prison.

The child, 5 years old at the time, was found dead on March 29, 2008, in the garden of the apartment block where her father lived with his second wife and the couple’s other two children.

Isabella lived with her mother, Ana Carolina de Oliveira, but usually spent weekends with her dad, the stepmother and their children.

According to the account given by Nardoni, an attorney, and Jatoba, the crime was committed by an unknown person soon after the family returned home from a party.

The unknown person, of whom no trace was ever found, had supposedly broken in to burglarize the apartment where the family lived, pushing the little girl out of the sixth-floor window as Nardoni and his wife went down to the garage to get the other two children, who had fallen asleep in the car.

Nonetheless, investigations indicated that the crime was committed by the father and stepmother because she was jealous of Isabella, as the girl’s mother testified on the first day of the trial, at which she was the first witness.

Prosecutors and expert witnesses charged that Isabella was attacked inside the car and was later strangled in the apartment by her stepmother and then by her father, who believed her dead and decided to throw her out the window to make it look like an attack by a third person.

De Oliveira said that her ex-husband was a violent man who even threatened to kill her over a disagreement about where the little girl should be sent to school.

The evidence consisted of traces of blood inside the family car and in the hallways of the apartment.

The two defendants returned to separate jails in the municipality of Tremembe, 147 kilometers (91 miles) from Sao Paulo, where they have been locked up since April 2008.

The same prisons also hold other defendants and convicts jailed for crimes that gained notoriety in the media and whose personal safety would be at risk in other penal institutions.

The second sentence of each, in semi-open prisons, will only be served after the first sentence has been completed.

The defense immediately announced that it would appeal the verdict.

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