In Castellamare di Stabia a 14-year-old boy, suffering from the autism spectrum and intellectual disability, was found alone in the gym without clothes or shoes and dirty with his excrement. Francesco, this is the boy’s name, attends the first year of school at the comprehensive “Karol Wojtyla” Institute. The story prompted the Torre Annunziata prosecutor to open an investigation after the parents filed a complaint: Such treatment should not be reserved for any living being, he told The morning Linda, the mother. «Francesco’s disturbance does not affect his sense of cleanliness: he knows how to make himself understood when he has to go to the bathroom. This means that our son was left alone, even for a long time, like a horse in a stable, ”the family added. The school, in the opinion of the parents, is not equipped to meet the needs of the child. The mother immediately understood that in the institute “there is no qualified staff and this is why I went to protest in the municipality”.
The alarm and the discovery
On 30 September around 11.30, Francesco’s mother receives a phone call from the cooperative that takes care of taking the boy from home to school: «Run to school. Francesco is all dirty ». Shortly after another call with the same message, finally the phone call from the school: “Something happened to the child.” When the two enter they find their clothes on a bench, their shoes too. The needs are scattered throughout the gym. After the initial dismay, the versions of how things went become discordant. Parents claim their son has been left alone for too long. Instead the school principal, Gaetano Gallinari, in addition to explaining to the carabinieri that the boy is provided with all possible assistance, specified that that day Francesco undressed as many times as he was asked to get dressed. “He had a fit and it was hard to calm him down. He then tried to pitch his needs towards his comrades. The gym is used because he needs large spaces: several times he has tried to uproot objects from the walls of the classrooms, ”he said.