A river-council chamber that has been going on for nearly ten hours.
The judges of the first Court of Assizes must decide
on the request for life imprisonment formulated by the Public Prosecutor of Rome for Finnegan Lee Elder and Gabriel Natale Hjorth
accused of the
conspiracy
in the murder of deputy brigadier Mario Cerciello Rega, killed with eleven stab wounds on the night of 26 July 2019 at culmination of a fight in a street a few steps from Piazza Cavour, the central area of the capital.
Waiting for the verdict, in addition to the family members of the Arma soldier, his wife Rosa Maria Esilio. Dressed in black even today, the woman followed the various stages of the trial, carried out in over 50 hearings, in which experts, witnesses and the defendants themselves were heard. A judicial process with forced stages, hearings also took place during the first lockdown, in which it was in fact "dissected" from every point of view on the dramatic night two years ago.
A story born after the two Americans, in search of drugs in Trastevere, had stolen the backpack of the drug facilitator Sergio Brugiatelli. The "negotiation" for the return of the bag was born from that episode, culminating in the 11 stab wounds inflicted by Elder in Cerciello, who had intervened with his colleague Andrea Varriale to recover it. In the indictment with which the prosecutor had solicited life imprisonment for the two defendants, on March 6, the prosecutor, Maria Sabina Calabretta, said that this affair is characterized by "serious facts" and " injustice that was committed against a good man, who was working ".
Reconstructing the phases of the dramatic struggle, the prosecutor explained that "the carabinieri qualified, showed their ID card and were on duty: they approached from the front, not from behind. Cerciello was not killed with a knife but with eleven blows in less than thirty seconds. The victim did not have time to develop any active defense "and in any case" he could have little even if he had been armed and he was not ".
