Three weeks after shocking Brazil by taking her dead uncle to a bank to take out a loan, Erika Nunes broke her silence in an interview with Fantástico and cried when she stated that she had not realized that Paulo Roberto Braga had died. “I’m not the horrible person they’re talking about, I’m not that monster,” she said, through tears.
Uncle Paulo’s niece spoke to Globo’s electronic magazine after leaving prison last Thursday (2). She spent 16 days in jail, but will respond to the case in freedom. “They were horrible days, away from my family. What I experienced was very difficult. It was horrible”, lamented the 42-year-old woman.
Erika said that her relationship with Paulo was peaceful. “He was independent, he walked, he did what he wanted, he had a good mind. He wasn’t in a wheelchair and I wasn’t his caregiver. I never was,” she explained, adding: “He drank a lot, he was quiet, but We always got along well.”
According to the niece, she didn’t even want Uncle Paulo to take out the loan to finance renovations to the house where they lived. “I didn’t need the money, but he wanted it. We always lived without my uncle having any income. My family always helped him. He just did odd jobs here, weeding a yard here, another there, but he didn’t have a fixed income. “
Asked why she held her uncle’s head when entering the bank, so that it wouldn’t fall down, Erika explained that it was a request from her own relative. “I asked if it was better with me holding his head, he said yes,” she said. “I didn’t realize my uncle was dead, I didn’t see it. He held onto the car door, he was alive.”
The niece also stated that she cannot remember exactly what happened at the bank. “I don’t know if it was the effect of the medicine I had taken that day. I took it from time to time. As I undergo treatment, I took Zolpidem, I took more than I should have”, she admitted.
She highlighted, however, that the bank employees had also not realized that Paulo was dead. “It was impossible to notice that there was anything wrong with him. I don’t think I nor many people realized that he passed away. How do you give a paper to a dead person to sign? If they had noticed something, they wouldn’t have given it.”
Erika only understood that Paulo Roberto Braga was no longer alive when a Samu (Mobile Emergency Care Service) employee called to help the man told her the news. “I thought he would improve, because it was just pneumonia. He had just been discharged, if the doctor discharged him, I thought everything was fine,” she said.
