After her ex-boyfriend reportedly abducted her and tattooed his name into her face after she left him, a young woman was irreparably damaged.
Tayane Caldas, 18, of So Paulo, Brazil, was on her way to school last Friday when she claims her boyfriend Gabriel Coelho, 20, approached her and pushed her into his car, which was being driven by his father, José Coelho.
The teen said she was driven to her ex-boyfriend’s home in the municipality of Taubaté, where he forcibly tattooed his full name on her face, starting near the side her right ear and ending on the side of her right chin area.
Gabriel Coelho reportedly kept Caldas trapped at his home where he physically and verbally abused her while her mother Deborah Velloso panicked that she had disappeared.
Velloso filed a missing person’s report before she tracked her daughter down to Coelho’s house on Saturday and took her home.
Once at the family residence, Coelho used makeup to cover the tattoo and bruises and was planning to leave for work, but her mother stopped her instead and accompanied her to the local police station where they filed an incident report.
‘She told me she was screaming for help when he was tying her up,’ Velloso said. ‘She told me,”Either I stopped screaming and let him do the tattoo or he was going to kill me in there.”‘
Coelho was taken into custody Saturday and is being held in preventive detention as authorities continue to investigate the incident.
He will also have to remain in jail for not complying with a restraining order that Caldas filed in 2022. She had also obtained a restraining order in 2021.
Coelho denied kidnapping his girlfriend and claimed she’d been happy to let him tattoo her.
His father, who works for the city of Taubaté, has already been interviewed by the police but is not in custody. He backed up his son’s account.
Caldas and Coelho met six years ago and dated for two years before recently ending the relationship.
‘I am afraid of him,’ Caldas told TV Band Vale. ‘The law these days, everyone knows he doesn’t stay in (jail) for long, and with this whole situation, I’m afraid of him.’
Her mother shared with G1 a series of text messages, pleading with Coelho to accept that his relationship with her daughter was over.
Velloso texted him, ‘you will be arrested if you don’t stop.’
Coelho responded by telling her that ‘I have no reason to be arrested’ and added that ‘I don’t need to go to prison for anyone.’
Velloso then replied, ‘go live your life and leave us alone.’
Coelho sent audio message asking her to stop texting him while adding, ‘nothing you say or stop saying will change what I’m going to do, okay? That’s it, big hug.’
Caldas is now undergoing laser treatment to remove the tattoo off her face as well as the other two tattoos of his name.
She attended the first of a couple dozen visits at a clinic on Wednesday following a show of support local clinics and influencers after her lawyer revealed her horrific ordeal on social media.
Caldas told news outlet G1 that she was feeling ‘a sense of relief, of happiness. To feel the beginning, to feel free’ after she completed her first session.