A father allegedly killed his three -month-old baby after giving his breast-feeding wife rat poison.
Luiz Edivaldo de Souza is accused of killing 36-year-old Josiele Lopes and their three-month-old son in the Brazilian municipality of Rio dos Cedros in September last year.
The dead bodies of Lopes and her baby son were found by the police on September 23 last year, having been missing since the 15th of the same month.
During that time, the suspect, then 34, had sent messages to his wife’s relatives, posing as her, before blocking the contacts.
Cops started to investigate the case after the woman’s eldest son, 17, went to the police and filed a police report.
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They concluded that the man had spiked his wife’s food with rat poison and that, after eating, she breastfed her baby son with her contaminated breast milk.
The woman then began to feel ill and asked her husband to take her to hospital.
However, he allegedly drove them instead to a wooded area in Rio dos Cedros, some 118 kilometres (73 miles) from their home in Itapema, where he buried the two, who were, by then, dead.
The police believe he committed the crime because his wife had asked for a separation.
The defendant’s legal team has until the end of next week to appeal the decision.
If the decision is not appealed, the court will set a date for the trial, when the defendant will respond to charges of homicide, concealment of the corpse and procedural fraud.