A mother of 8 was viciously murdered this morning in Belmopan. Police found 45 year old Maria Chacon's body inside her home on Panama Street in Salvapan. Reports are that she got in a terrible fight with her common law husband and he allegedly hacked her to death. But this is not the first time he has attacked her. I traveled to Belmopan today to find out about the history of violence that led to Chacon's death.
Courtney Weatherburne reporting
It's on this scorched homemade stove that Maria Candelaria Chacon fried plantains. She would wake up early every morning to make plantain chips, then she would package them and go out to sell.
Chacon was happy because she had gotten a fresh stack of plantains to fry this morning. But she didn't get to them because she was murdered right inside her rented room.
Chacon had a fight with her common law husband last night and it only got worse this morning. A neighbor told us off camera that around 5:30, she was awakened by a commotion.
Voice of Neighbor (translated)
"I felt terrible to get up, to wake up to her shouts. I thought it was my mom but it wasn't, I felt bad to hear that he was beating her and we tried to stop him."
The neighbor and her mother were banging on the other side of this door trying to get in to save Chacon but he had locked it. A couple minutes later he emerged from the room in a rage, grabbed a machete, went back into the room and locked it. Chacon's screams crescendoed and it is believed that he chopped her to the head and neck.
The neighbor climbed up and peered through the opening in this partition and that's when she saw the end of a gruesome attack.
Voice of Neighbor (translated)
"He held her by her hair he tore off a piece of her hair and held her like that until she died."
Chacon and her common law husband had been together for 5 years. It was a toxic relationship where he abused her repeatedly. According to the husband's mother, her son was mentally ill and it was aggravated by alcohol abuse:
Albena Perez, Mother of Accused (translated)
"When he gets crazy, he becomes violent or he runs out and says they want to kill him. When he drinks, it takes him over for 15 days, and when he stops drinking, that's when he geos mad."
Chacon's mother warned her countless times to leave her common law husband but she never listened.
Catalina Chacon, Mother of Victim (translated)
"I am left so sad for her, so many times we told her to leave that man, leave that man! But she didn't want to leave him."
Marcelo Lemus, Brother of Victim (translated)
"To take a life, he is not God to take a life, we don't have the right to take the life of another, only God brought us here and only He gave us the breath of life and now for someone like him to take my sisters life. That is not possible."
But that is this family's reality now - they tried to sear away all that pain by burning her bloodstained mattress and clothes, but their lives will forever be scattered in disarray.....like the singed remains of the fire.
She had her 8 kids from a previous relationship, but had no children with her common law husband. They had been renting that room on Panama Street for less than a year.
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