Two young Americans were sentenced Wednesday, May 5 to life imprisonment by a court in Rome for the murder of a rifleman in July 2019 while they were on vacation in the Italian capital.
Finnegan Lee Elder and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, aged 19 and 18 at the time of the crime, were found guilty of stabbing Mario Cerciello Rega, 35, during an intervention with one of his colleagues in August 2019.
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Finnegan Lee Elder, who admitted to stabbing the victim eleven, claimed that he and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth had been attacked by men they believed to be drug traffickers. According to elements gathered during the investigation, the two Americans had seized the bag of the intermediary of a dealer who had sold them aspirin for cocaine and demanded 100 euros to return it to him. But the latter, an indicator, had warned the police and it was the carabinieri who had gone to the meeting fixed for the exchange.
The defendants, from San Francisco, California, claimed that the two riflemen, who were in civilian clothes and were unarmed, did not identify themselves as such.
The colleague of the killed rifleman, Andrea Varriale, rejected this version.
"We appeared before them (...) as riflemen,"
he testified.
Even though Mario Cerciello was stabbed by Finnegan Lee Elder, Gabriel Natale-Hjorth is on trial alongside him because, under Italian law, anyone who indirectly participates in a murder can be charged with homicide.
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Occurring in the heart of the summer of 2019, this murder had aroused strong emotion in Italy and a surge of sympathy towards the young rifleman, just returned from his honeymoon. But the defense also brought to light contradictory statements and failures in the investigation, in particular a falsified report and the false testimony of the rifleman Varriale, who had assured to be armed at the time of the intervention. The case had also provoked a controversy after the dissemination of photos of Gabriel Natale-Hjorth in which he was seen blindfolded and his hands tied behind his back in a police station after his arrest.