Cyclists run over, killed and left on the road. The world of sport faces a new mourning and the word “pirate” returns to the reports of the police forces. On the same day as Davide Rebellin, another athlete is killed by a motorist who then runs away. Manuel Lorenzo Ntubejust 15 years old, a young promise of Calcio Padova and a student at the Einaudi schools in Ferrara, lost his life not far from home.
The friend who was with him was 17 years old: now he is fighting for his life at the Sant’Anna di Cona hospital, where he is kept in a pharmacological coma. The two were hit by a Nissan Qashqai SUV around ten in the evening, in a suburban area of Ferrara. The young footballer was thrown onto the ditch that runs along the provincial road, the other was catapulted into the middle of the road. But the driver of the car, a thirty-seven year old from Ferrara, didn’t stop to help them. He pressed his foot on the accelerator and walked away, only to then show up in command three hours later, reporting what had happened. He is now being investigated for vehicular homicide and hit and miss. The alcohol test was negative, he hadn’t been drinking.
Manuel Ntube he would have turned 16 next week. The mother, Sabrina Buzzoni, on Wednesday evening she was worried not seeing him come back. “He didn’t come home and so, with my nephew, I went to look for him,” she said. «I saw the flashing lights, I arrived at the scene of the accident. They told me there was a boy deceased. They described the clothes and, at that point, I understood that it was Manuel».
Father from Cameroon, mother from Ferrara, he grew up as a footballer in Olimpia Quartesana, a neighborhood team in the city of Ferrara. For two years he had made the leap to Calcio Padova, where he played as a defender. His brother, Michael, is in Albinoleffe. “In Padua he was getting good, but fate wanted this” repeats the desperate mother. As for the evening, the family members are trying to reconstruct the last few hours.
“They were out and about as they often do but there wasn’t a particular occasion.” His coach Giuseppe Agostini can’t rest: «Manuel was always in a hurry to pursue his dream. He took the bike to go to the station in Ferrara, then the train, finally the minibus for the training camp. Sometimes he was late, I was often on the phone with his mother. We followed him step by step. Manuel was the mascot of the group, he always had a joke ready, he listened to rap music ». Last Saturday he received his first call-up to the Primavera squad for the match against Spal.
Wednesday the day began with another mourning capable of upsetting the world of sport. In the province of Vicenza, a pirate truck overwhelmed and killed the cyclist Davide Rebellin. The carabinieri now have a license plate but it won’t be easy to track down the haulier, because he could already be abroad. Europol is also participating in the research. The prosecutor in charge of the investigation, Claudia Brunino, has opened a file hypothesizing the crimes of road homicide and hit and miss. Based on the elements collected by the carabinieri, it seems very unlikely that the truck driver did not notice anything. The heavy vehicle would have stopped in the square of a club, there the haulier would have come out of the driver’s cab to take a look at the bodywork, and then get back on the road.