Woman killed son, now hangs herself in Argentine jail

Buenos Aires, April 17 (IANS/EFE) The Brazilian woman who confessed on television to killing her six-year-old son to take revenge on her ex-husband has died in a hospital on the outskirts of Buenos Aires after attempting to hang herself in an Argentine jail, authorities said.

Adriana Cruz, 42, Sunday night asked permission to go to the bathroom and there she "hanged herself with a stocking". But the guards noticed the suicide attempt and intervened, taking her - still alive - to the hospital where she died Monday, according to Judge Juan Pablo Masi, who is in charge of the murder case of the woman's son.

"She injured herself (in a way) that then proved irreversible," the judge told C5N television in reporting that Cruz died Monday morning in the intensive care unit of Alejandro Korn Hospital.

The woman was brought to the hospital after suffering cardiac and respiratory arrest "as a consequence of asphyxiation, with injuries on her neck. She was revived, but she was in very serious condition, ... in a deep coma", hospital director Egidio Melia told reporters.

In mid-March, a domestic worker reported finding Cruz - who had fainted - near her six-year-old son Martin, who had been hanged with a man's tie in the bathroom.

The Brazilian woman refused to give a statement to authorities, but when she was being transferred in an automobile from the prosecutor's office to the jail she confessed through the window to a television reporter that she had murdered the boy.

"I killed him to wreck his father," said Cruz, and when she was asked if it was an act of revenge, she responded "yes".

Prosecutor Leandro Heredia said that the situation in Cruz's home, located in an exclusive development on the outskirts of the Argentine capital, was "Dantesque" and he broke down in tears when he saw the dead child because, he said, he looked "identical" to his own son.

He said that the women was going through "a difficult separation" with her ex-husband, a business executive by whom she also had two daughters.

--IANS/EFE

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