The last glimmers of hope were extinguished at 5.40 pm yesterday, when the University and the ASL of Pisa concluded the verification of the clinical tests on the conditions of Barbara Capovani, the 55-year-old psychiatrist, mother of three children, massacred in bludgeoning from a former patient. The commission of specialists had in fact started the investigation process to be able to declare the woman’s brain dead, later ascertained in the late evening. Soon after, the authorization for organ harvesting started. It is the conclusion of a day that began at four in the morning with the news of the arrest of the only suspect in the ferocious attack on the Pisan doctor.
His name is Gianluca Paul Seung, he is 35 years old, Chinese father and Italian mother: suffering from mental disorders, he lived by his wits in Torre del Lago Puccini, a hamlet of Viareggio (Lucca). Judged by the investigators as a “highly dangerous” person, his criminal record is studded with precedents for violence, even carnal. He had even managed to escape from some precautionary measures. In his raids he had beaten a doctor from Viareggio to death, created havoc in the court of Lucca, molested a minor.
He called himself a “shaman” who fought injustice and was angry with the world. On social media he had announced the birth of a non-existent association for the defense of psychiatric users and was a frequent visitor to prosecutors and police stations, where he presented exposed rantings including, among the most improbable, one against the then prime minister Mario Draghi. And, again, he warned his alleged followers about the plots hatched by Queen Elizabeth of England against the President of the Republic Mattarella and called the Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris a friend of the mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro.
Yet, despite the indictments, the trials still in progress, three sheets of via (Viareggio, Lucca and Pisa) and some attempts at treatment that proved difficult to carry out (after the first meetings he no longer presented himself to the doctors or had a hostile attitude ), Seung was a free man. In 2019 he was being treated by Dr. Capovani in Pisa. He seemed to have improved, but then he decided to interrupt the therapeutic process and, in his mind, he had turned that doctor into an enemy. Probably because he had questioned his inability to understand and want, which the man used as a shield before justice.
There is a report dated November 27, 2019, which could be the motive for the attack, in which Dr. Capovani defines the personality of the patient, affected by “narcissistic, antisocial and paranoid” disorders. But he also writes that «the patient appears totally aware of his own actions and their disvalue». He had responded on social media accusing the psychiatrist of every ignominy. And month after month, year after year, the “shaman” had thought of his revenge, the definitive one. Which should have taken place on Thursday, the day before the attack.
According to the investigations, that day the man had presented himself to the psychiatry department of the Santa Chiara hospital and had asked to speak to Dr. Capovani. She wasn’t there and so he would decide to act the next day. When the police raided his home on Friday night, Seung hurled himself at the officers with pepper spray and then attempted to grab a crossbow loaded with bolts that he kept under his bed. He was handcuffed with difficulty and locked up in the Don Bosco prison in Pisa.