San Juan de Dios Hospital, Manresa, second floor. It is September 5, 1988. Jesús accompanies his brother, who is hospitalized for an asthma attack. 13 years old and bored runs away to smoke. At that time, minors were allowed to smoke, or at least approved, to do so inside the center, in a room reserved for them.
He heard some children shouting: “A man dressed as a doctor takes them in a wheelchair”, invoice. The following scene is shocking, if true:They gave an injection and covered themselves with a white cloth.. “These kids were my brothers Isidre and Dolors,” says Mari Carmen Orrit. They disappeared 34 years ago and until a few months ago no one had given any information. This is the first statement the family has received in decades from someone who was hospitalized that morning.
“Where are the children?”
“At 9:00 am on September 5, the City Police knocked on the door,” recalls Mari Carmen. His mother, María, took care of her children before leaving for work. “Where are the children? Where are Isidre and Dolors?” They asked as soon as they opened.
“In San Juan de Dios,” the woman replied. The youngest of 14 children, Isidre – born 15, but died when Montserrat was 3 months old – had been hospitalized two days earlier. The penicillin treatment they had given him for angina had caused a reaction.. With him remained his 17-year-old sister, Dolors, to spend the night. “They are not in the hospital”, The agents replied.
“My mother put her hands to her head: ‘If they’re not there, where will they be?’” Mari Carmen recalls. She was widowed two months ago. Both of her children had disappeared. Thirty-four years later they are still not there.
After decades of research, in 2021 Jesus decided to reveal for the first time what he claimed to have seen that day. She did this in the TV show ‘Viva la Vida’. He was a kid then and was on the same floor as Isidre and Dolors.
Three people
“She saw how they put Dolors in a wheelchair with Isidre in their arms,” says Mari Carmen. “They were crying and looking for my mother”. Jesus assures that after 34 years the screams did not come out of his head. She followed them, “she saw them go to the bottom… she went down too,” says Mari Carmen.
“There was a curtain made of plastic, like in swimming pools. She says she pushed it aside and stopped crying when she saw the child being given an injection. They threw him on a stretcher and covered him with a white sheet.says the woman, “My sister was crying all the time. They gave him another injection and they covered him with another white sheet.” The witness describes that there were several stretchers with green sheets in the room.
“There were three men,” he says, “all dressed in doctor’s clothes: the one who took my brothers off in a wheelchair, waited for him, and gave them injections and needles. a third man doing like an autopsy“This last one confirms Jesus, looked where he was and saw him.” He said: ‘Take it!’ And then he ran away.”
“My brother’s doctor said he was on vacation when he disappeared and he wasn’t going to miss it for a prank,” says Mari Carmen.
Until 2021, the investigation was silent. Two small children had disappeared in a hospital. Nothing else was known. There were three police hypotheses: kidnapping, escape or family abduction. The alarm went off at around 6.30 am when the nurse came to put the thermometer in the boy. “That was when they saw that neither of them were there.”
Called late and petty, says Mari Carmen: “The City Guard came to the house, but when my mother asked them what to do, they were told they had to wait 24 or 48 hours to file a complaint and start searching“. Shock prevailed. “It took 15 days for the dogs to find the medical center; “The first interrogations were made six years after the disappearance,” he said.
The hospital was little concerned, Orrit complains: “The director told us, through a nurse, that this is not a prison and that the person he wanted comes and goes.” Still hard to understand, “Isidre was 5 years old…wasn’t that her responsibility?” The doctor who took the child was no longer helpful, says the family: “He said he was going on vacation to Turkey and that he wouldn’t miss it as a joke.“.
Possible leak investigated: “It wasn’t my sister ready to runr, I was a very introverted girl and blind, this was noticed a little late and cost him to learn. He was older when they saw he needed glasses, he didn’t even know the letters, he couldn’t get by on his own.” It was thrown.
Another line of investigation was to rule out a possible abduction by the family: “We thought about this theory for a long time,” says Mari Carmen. “A girl from the cafeteria told me she heard from my uncles that when my father was admitted to San Juan de Dios Hospital for cancer, my mother had to put the kids up for adoption… in that hospital,” the woman adds.
A private detective who had helped the Orrit family for years pointed in this direction. “But it doesn’t make sense… If you have the money and you’re risking taking the kids, you’ll set up your life elsewhere and have them with you. What you don’t do is stay in your own city—he stayed—and send those kids with other relatives.
“A police officer told me that they still want the child for adoption and that they are making my sister work as a prostitute”
Investigators also ruled out the possibility of kidnapping: “That’s all that’s left, isn’t it? Organ trafficking, white slavery, adoption…” Mari Carmen meditates harshly and painfully. “At first the police said so. who would kidnap some kids who weren’t nobodyBut what happened next?” the woman cries.
“A police officer told me that they still wanted to adopt the boy and that my sister was taken to a prostitution site. I remember telling her: but she’s a girl!… and she replied, ‘OK. there are a lot of guys who like girls‘. My heart stopped.”
a detective
The Orrit family over the years fought the elements to find out what it was. María wrote to the King, Jordi Pujol… with no response except acknowledgment of receipt.
Orrit claims that the “contradictory” summary has only one conclusive proof: Dolors’ glasses that allegedly were in the room. “They give it to us 30 years later: We analyzed the DNA, they were from an older person, not my sister.”
The Orrit family suffered from absence and oblivion, Also cheating. A detective stole 50,000 pesetas from them at the time. “With the situation of my mother, who is a widow, who has eleven children at home, three of whom is out… She asked us for money to start the investigation. We went to La Caixa and they gave us permission because they saw us so badly. To give it back little by little,” she recalls. . They paid the detective “and he never saw us again.”
lawsuit filed
The justice considered the abduction hypothesis in the Isidre case and the hypothesis of persuading him to leave the house in the Dolors case. The lawsuit was filed in 2016. The new testimony of the witness brought before the Manresa Court was not sufficient to reopen the case envisaged by the crimes. “What evidence of induction…? It’s a disappearance,” Mari Carmen denounced. From a legal standpoint the difference is remarkable: losses are unpredictable until the absentee is discovered; crimes, yes.
They applied to the Human Rights Court (ECHR) I am waiting for a reply from Strasbourg. “We want this to be reviewed, treated as a loss. They’ve spent years saying it’s nothing to pull off and they don’t want to hear it now that we have it.”
Angela, María Rosa, Alfredo, Mari Carmen, Engracia, Manel, Jordi, Isabel, Montserrat, Yolanda, Marta, Daniel, María Teresa… are María’s children. Two people are missing from this list: Isidre and Dolors. He doesn’t know where they are.