'A mother does not kill her own child': videos show Monique's version of Henry's death

Before the jurors, Monique Medeiros da Costa e Silva summarized her defense in a single sentence: "A mother does not kill her own child." Held in pretrial detention for two years and eight months in a unit reserved for inmates convicted of crimes against children and the elderly, she told the jury that, had she known anything that night, she would be "answering for Jairinho's homicide" or "buried alongside" her son.

The jury agreed in part. On June 4, following the longest trial in the history of Rio de Janeiro — which began on May 25 — the panel of jurors convicted former city councilman Jairo Souza Santos Júnior, known as Dr. Jairinho, to 43 years, 9 months and 20 days in prison for the aggravated homicide of Henry Borel, 4, in addition to charges of torture and witness tampering.

In Monique's case, the jurors rejected the intent to kill: they reclassified the charge to involuntary manslaughter and convicted her solely of torture by omission, sentencing her to 1 year and 4 months — a term already served during the pretrial detention period. Judge Elizabeth Machado Louro granted her a judicial pardon.

The courts have not yet ruled on the prosecution's appeals, which seek to annul the pardon granted to Monique, while Jairinho's defense is seeking to invalidate the entire trial.

Videos of the interrogation, to which Folha gained access, reveal the account Monique presented in court: that of a grieving woman who claims she saw no warning signs — neither in her son nor in the man with whom she shared a home.

The early hours

Henry died in the early hours of March 8, 2021, in an apartment in Barra da Tijuca, in the southwestern zone of Rio de Janeiro, where he lived with his mother and stepfather. The report from the IML (Instituto Médico-Legal) identified a liver laceration caused by blunt force trauma and internal hemorrhaging.

At the trial, Monique described her account of that night minute by minute. She said she had taken sleeping medication and found her son uncovered, lying on his back, with cold feet — "his little eyes staring at nothing." According to her account, Jairinho suggested the boy might have "swallowed something"; she replied that her son "doesn't put anything in his mouth."

At the hospital, she said, resuscitation efforts lasted two and a half hours.

It was also during this part of her testimony that Monique admitted having repeated to doctors, upon arriving at the hospital, the version she attributed to Jairinho — that the couple had "heard a noise" and found the boy fallen from the bed. She told the jury she had heard no noise at all.

The grief

In the days following Henry's death, Monique exchanged messages with her father. These were read aloud in court by her defense team as a real-time record of her grief, before suspicion turned against the couple.

In the messages, she blamed herself for not putting her son to sleep in his own bed, "which was lower," and wrote that the only reason she had not taken her own life was because her religion forbade it and because she wanted to be reunited with him. "I miss him so much, it feels like my heart is bleeding," she wrote.

She also told the jury about the physical collapse she suffered in those weeks — she pulled out her hair, bit her nails until they bled, and stopped eating — and challenged the use of a photograph of herself that circulated at the time: she said the image had been taken out of context, and that a first photo, in which she appeared crying, sent to a godmother undergoing cancer treatment, had never been made public.

The confrontation with Jairinho

Monique and Jairinho were arrested one month after Henry's death. The break between them, according to her testimony to the jury, occurred in jail, when her cousins showed her the statement of a former girlfriend of the ex-councilman asserting that he had been awake, exchanging messages, in the early hours of the night of the death.

Until that point, Monique had maintained the version that Jairinho had taken sleeping medication — guidance that, she said, had come from the lawyer who was then representing both of them.

"At that moment I understood that Jairo had not taken any medication," she told the jury. At their next meeting, she recounted having slapped him across the face: "I told him: you killed my son." Jairinho, according to her account, picked up a Bible and swore he had never laid a hand on the boy. "At that moment I still believed in Jairo," she admitted to the jurors.

The defenses

In his own interrogation, Jairinho denied the accusations. His defense argued that the testimonies of the former girlfriends accusing him of violence — including the one that triggered Monique's change of position — had been orchestrated by individuals connected to Leniel Borel, Henry's father.

The former councilman acknowledged only "senseless choices": "Some of those senseless things included some of the acts of infidelity I committed."

The interrogations laid bare opposing strategies. Monique presented herself as a grieving mother and a manipulated woman within a relationship she only came to understand as abusive after the tragedy — a thesis her defense advanced during the proceedings. Jairinho presented himself as the target of a media trial; the first question from his attorney placed on record that "the media" had portrayed him as a "monster."

In granting the judicial pardon, Judge Elizabeth Machado Louro stated that Monique had already suffered sufficient punishment, citing the loss of her only child, the assaults she had allegedly suffered in prison, and what she described as a "massacre on social media."

The magistrate classified society's reaction against the defendant as disproportionate and discriminatory, the product of a culture that demands women be a "perfect mother."

Jairinho was also ordered to pay Leniel Borel R$400,000 in moral damages. He is serving his sentence in a closed regime. The decision is subject to appeal.