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SENSUNTEPEQUE, El Salvador (AP) — Weeping relatives laid to rest the remains of four small children who were killed in their U.S. home and their father, who committed suicide in the same house, on Thursday in Sensuntepeque, the family’s hometown, 60 miles northeast of the capital of San Salvador.
Relatives appeared visibly divided at a funeral mass where the four small metal coffins were arranged in a chapel; some mourners wondering out loud whether the children’s missing mother had played a role in their deaths, while other defended her.
Pedro Rodriguez — who shares the same name as his son, Pedro Rodriguez, 28, the children’s father — said he thought the mother, Deysi Benitez, may have killed them. Benitez is on the FBI’s national list of missing persons.
“I can’t say for sure, but I do think she killed the children and my son,” said the elder Rodriguez, as taped music played at the funeral service.
His wife, Rosa Imelda Rodriguez, noted that “only she (Benitez) knows what she has done,” and added “my pain is very great.”
At the other side of the chapel, Benitez’s mother, Carmen Quinteros, said “only God knows what happened. But I have this enormous pain in my heart, because I don’t know what has happened to my daughter.”
As her other daughter, Angela, tried to comfort her, Carmen Quinteros said “my daughter could not have harmed her children. She loved them, and she loved the children’s father.”
The funeral service was attended by almost 1,000 town residents; later, the metal coffins were laid to rest together in a concrete crypt: the father’s larger coffin in the middle, with two children on each side.
It was a terrible homecoming for Pedro Rodriguez, who left Sensuntepeque, a small farming community, with his wife and eldest child eight years ago to seek a better life.
His four children — Vanessa Rodriguez, 4; Carena, 1; Elsa, 9; and their 3-year-old brother Angel, were found murdered on March 26 at the family’s threebedroom townhome in Frederick .
Autopsies showed that the three girls were suffocated and Angel, the boy, was bludgeoned to death. Authorities have declined to say who may have killed the children.
Relatives and co-workers have said the family struggled with language problems and financial difficulties and that the marriage was troubled. The parents and their oldest daughter were legal immigrants from El Salvador, while the three other children were born in the U.S.
Rodriguez learned March 15 that he would lose his factory job at a door-manufacturing plant scheduled to close in July. Benitez worked in a restaurant kitchen.
“These little angels are gone,” Quinteros said at the funeral service.
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