Two persons apparently died by their own hands over the Easter weekend in Benque Viejo del Carmen.
On April 10, Mario Barrillas, 38, of the New Border Road in Benque Viejo Town, reported to police that at 3:00 p.m. that day he arrived home to find his common-law wife, Marta Lidia, Hernandez, 34, suffering from stomach pains.
When he inquired about what happened, she told him that she had drunk liquid from a bottle that he identified as containing the poison malathion.
Barrillas immediately took his wife to the hospital in Melchor, but she was pronounced dead on arrival.
At the scene, police recovered an empty white plastic bottle from which the poison was ingested. A post-mortem on the body by Guatemalan doctors (Hernandez is from Guatemala and was buried there) certified the ingestion of poison as the cause of death.
Just before 5:00 a.m. on Easter Sunday, police were again called out, this time to Caracol Lane, where they found a man identified as Pedro Antonio Medina, 21, hanging by the neck from a yellow rope tied to a “kinep” tree.
Pedro’s mother, Elena Medina, 69, told police that Pedro had told her previously that a woman, who is the mother of his child, was “chasing him from” her.
The body showed no physical injuries and police have ruled out foul play, treating the case as a suicide.
Medina’s body was transported to the San Ignacio Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. A subsequent post-mortem revealed that the cause of death was bronchial aspiration and asphyxia due to hanging.