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A mother-of-six who was seen on video wheeling the corpse of her uncle to a bank and trying to grip his hand over a pen to make him sign for a loan has spoken for the first time.
Erika de Souza, 42, has revealed that she was not aware that he was dead when she attempted to get him to sign for a $3,250 loan.
She also claimed she does not recall taking Paulo Braga, 68, to the branch on April 16 in the Rio de Janeiro town of Bangu and interacting with the workers, who called the police because they were alarmed by her behavior.
De Souza, who is being investigated in Brazil for manslaughter, was released from jail Thursday and said she does not remember a lot of what took place on the bizarre, eventful visit to the bank.
She revealed she is currently under psychiatric treatment and that she took Zolpidem, a sedative prescribed to treat insomnia.
“I can’t remember much,” de Souza said in an interview with Brazilian news magazine show Fantastico.
“I don’t know if it was the effect of the medicine that day,” she added, claiming that she may have taken more those than prescribed by her doctor.
Surveillance cameras showed de Souza pushing the wheelchair through a mall parking lot and then through the shopping center’s hallways before she strolled inside the bank.
Footage showed her walking away from a bank employee’s desk and the worker placing her hand behind Braga’s head, unaware that he was dead.
De Souza then returned with a cup of water and tried to feed it to the corpse. She was also seen talking to her dead uncle while trying to grip a pen with his right hand to sign the loan document.
“Neither I nor many people noticed,” she said. “How do you give a paper to a dead person to sign?”
De Souza was charged with vilification of a corpse and attempted embezzlement and remained in prison until Thursday, May 2.
The judge overseeing the case removed her from pretrial detention because she is not considered a flight risk and takes care of her underaged daughter, who has special needs.
“They were horrible days away from my family. I lived moments in my life that I couldn’t bear anymore,” de Souza said.
“Very difficult. It was horrible, I didn’t realize that my uncle was dead … I’m not that person they’re talking about, I’m not that monster.”
Braga was hospitalized for pneumonia and discharged April 15. De Souza accompanied him to a bank branch the same day and they were instructed to visit another location where they could withdraw the money that he had planned to use for home improvements.
She indicated that Braga asked her to take him to the bank and that he felt fine on the ride to the bank. She recalled that prior to entering the bank, she asked her uncle if she could place her hands behind his head.
“I asked if that would be better, he said yes,” she said.
However, security cameras at the bank showed that Braga was motionless while he sat on the chair and his head tilted back on multiple occasions, causing de Souza and the bank worker to support his head with their hands.
Braga was declared dead at the bank by paramedics. Cadaver marks behind his head indicated that he would have been dead for at least two hours before he was wheeled into the bank.
The Rio de Janeiro Civil Police filed a report with the Public Ministry last week alleging that de Souza knew Braga was dead before she took him to the bank.
“She knew this fact (of death), as he is (in the video) with his head down and without any movement, however, right before entering, she holds him by the neck so that he has his head up, simulating a person alive,” Civil Police chief Fabio Souza said in his findings, which were obtained by TV Globo.
“There is no doubt that Érika knew about Paulo’s death, but, as it was her last chance to withdraw the money from the loan, she entered the bank with the corpse, simulated for several minutes that he was alive, even pretending to give water, took the pen and held his hand close to the hand of Paulo’s corpse,” Souza added.
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