The attempt to negotiate the sentence of Wolfgang Rieke, the 63-year-old German truck driver who on 30 November 2022 ran over and killed former cycling champion Davide Rebellin with his truck in Montebello Vicentino, was rejected for the second time today.
We will therefore proceed to a regular trial.
After the first rejection last February in the preliminary hearing, today the Court of Vicenza reiterated its no to any discount for that crime.
Instead of the three years and 11 months agreed with prosecutor Roderich Blattner, the truck driver will undergo a regular trial starting from May 27th.
It is likely that the sentence will arrive shortly, given that there are no witnesses to what happened and the two technical consultants for the prosecution and defense will be heard among the first.
The judges' decision can be considered a technicality, explains the truck driver's lawyer, Andrea Nardin: it was impossible, he admits, for the judges to accept the sentence already rejected with the same formula at the preliminary hearing.
Also weighing on the decision is the fact that for Rieke, accused of vehicular homicide, the aggravating circumstance of escape was hypothesized.
After hitting the cyclist, the man remained a few meters from Rebellin's lifeless body for about 15 minutes, only worrying about erasing the most obvious traces of blood with saliva.
After returning home via back roads to avoid being spotted, Rieke had replaced the trailer and washed the vehicle with a powerful detergent to remove any signs of the impact.
What nailed him were the surveillance images of the area scanned frame by frame by the investigators.
Knowing he had been identified, last August 25th he spontaneously showed up at Brenner and was taken to prison in Vicenza where he remained until a few days ago, to be placed under house arrest, with an electronic bracelet, in a house in Monastier, in the Treviso area.
Rebellin's wife, mother and three brothers have already been compensated by the insurance company of the heavy vehicle but they are not hiding their satisfaction at this time.
"It was a nice surprise - comments Carlo, brother of the former champion -. We didn't expect it, we feared that the college, after granting house arrest to the accused, would also agree to the plea bargain. We can only be satisfied with the fact that, instead, the judges decided to go ahead and send him to trial."
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