Florence, June 25, 2023 – This is a bad story.
Because it’s in the middle a little girl and children’s stories, in real life, often don’t have as happy endings as in fairy tales. And this is far from a fairy tale, on the contrary, it looks more like those scary stories that were told to us as children and which were sometimes used as a deterrent by our grandparents to curb the recklessness of age: “Be careful, that then comes the Boogeyman”.
Kata in an image from Facebook. In the circle the small shot from the cameras
Yes, the Black Man, the one who takes you and takes you away, who doesn’t have a name, doesn’t have a face, probably doesn’t even have a soul. Because it takes a heart as cold and deep as the ocean to become the protagonist of this story, where the victim is a five-year-old girl, Kata, who smiles at us from every photograph, the only thing we have left of her for fifteen days. Poor little girl who fell into a black hole in the heart of Florence, witnessing a terrible story, sweaty and as always busy with its thousand problems. And then there is an investigation, born badly from the beginning and finished, to date, on a dead end.
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Why Kata is no longer found. And I immediately say the most painful thing, but which becomes more and more probable every minute, every hour and every day that takes us away from the moment of her disappearance: the possibility that Kata is now dead. Not only because fifteen days have passed, but also, and above all, because the scenario that could make one think of such a small child still alive, after all this time, makes you shiver and it’s better not even to think about it. So, however paradoxical, miracles excluded, the discovery of little Kata is today the least dramatic scenario possible. Viva? Let’s hope. dead? Painful but possible. And in that case the story would end there. If she weren’t found instead, Kata’s story would never end and, as a parent, I believe there can be no worse torment than not knowing where your daughter is.
The last picture Kata’s life is when a camera sees her return to what is in fact her home, the former Astor hotel, a hotel occupied by 130 Peruvians where there is everything inside: drugs, racketeering and God knows what else . For months the San Jacopino neighborhood has been in revolt and the inhabitants have been asking to expel all those people, but that’s a whole other story.
Kata returns home at 15.13 on June 10, a camera tells us. She is alone because she had a fight with some of her friends, with whom she always plays while her mother is at work and he is entrusted to an uncle. Dad? Father is in prison. The evidence of Kata’s existence in life ends there. An hour and a half later, at a quarter to five in the afternoon, the mother realizes that the child is no longer to be found and the alarm goes off.
The investigation part. And it starts badly. Because the prosecutor’s office doesn’t order the immediate closure of the crime scene. The former Astor hotel is not sealed and the occupants are not immediately removed en bloc, so much so that the molecular dogs, in search of the baby’s traces, will only be used the next day and will get lost in the maze of the former Astor between cooking smells and smells of all kinds.
The District Anti-Mafia Directorate also enters the field, because at the Florence prosecutor’s office – for some time without a boss – they creatively open a kidnapping file, a crime for which the Dda is precisely competent. There is only one track: the child was taken by someone related to the family, perhaps it is one vendetta against parents, indeed it is one faida fra clan peruviani. And it is a surprising thesis given that, in Florence, Peruvian gangs – admitted and not granted that they exist here and that they are as violent as in northern Italy – are known only for being a petty cabotage crime and do not appear as a high-profile crime thick, able to even manage the kidnapping of a little girl.
But all investigative resources are concentrated there: on the Astor. And one does what one should never do, as even a superfine magistrate like Pier Luigi Vigna taught: one does not try to refute one’s thesis, to falsify it as the epistemologist Karl Popper said, of whom Vigna (also a graduate in philosophy) was a great admirer, but you fall in love with your own theory. And it is, and will be, the worst possible thing in an investigation.
The girl is never seen leaving the ex Astor, ergo she is in there, dead or alive. And so the former hotel in via Maragliano, three thousand square meters of decay and social hardship, is emptied and overturned for two days: one looks everywhere, even in the sewers, in the manholes. And no one, in the meantime, thinks of doing a logical thing: acquire images of thousands of video surveillance cameras of the city. It will be done only after ten days. While the certainties crumble: Kata is not there, at the Astor.
As the investigation starts from scratch. So let’s try to take an alternative route and assume that anyone who wants to take a child can’t find a better place than a structure like the former Astor, where the children were left alone for hours. And once you understand this, it doesn’t take much, just stand there and observe. And wait for the right opportunity. Coincidentally, in fact, Kata disappears just when she is left alone, she returns to the former hotel and is never seen going out again. But that property is a sieve with a thousand exits and a 5-year-old girl is small, so much so that, perhaps passed out, she can be stuffed into a suitcase or a bag and taken away.
The word pedophilia is a heavy black curtain that now falls on this whole story. And now we all hope, even against logic, that Kata is still alive and that she didn’t die immediately, or at least that her passage to the other side was quick and as painless as possible. Because, we repeat, it would truly be a miracle if Kata were still alive today. But it is intolerable to imagine what may have happened to her in the last fortnight. So, but it’s bloody hard to explain, I hope Kata smile now and forever. In the pictures. And that she stopped suffering.