They harassed him, it seems. On his cell phone they found unequivocal messages. “You have to kill yourself”, they wrote him. “Get down”. “Kill yourself”. Who knows if they really wanted that torment to become an inescapable imperative. Who knows what they thought. Who knows what they think now that their target is gone.
Alessandro was thirteen, a girl he left a message to, parents who loved him. They tell us about it tall, handsome, intelligent, good at school.
He fell from the window on the fourth floor of his house in Gragnano, in the province of Naples. It looked like an accident. But no.
The Torre Annunziata prosecutor has opened an investigation. Crime hypothesis: instigation to suicide. Among the five suspects there are minors.
This story opens up frightening abysses that are hard to lean over. Alessandro would have started the eighth grade, like my son, like so many children and so many grandchildren. As far as we know about him, Alessandro could have been ours. Unripe, cryptic, elusive, fragile, perfect. They are all a bit like that, aren’t they? Potential proximity to him makes you dizzy. In the inevitable and involuntary transference, it is with the victims that we identify ourselves, with their parents in love, with their broken affections.
And those five, including some minors, entered in the register of suspects? Bullies with no face and no outline, doers, extenders of unspeakable imperatives, weavers of atrocious plots. We take our eyes and thoughts away from them. Tangle of deviance. Shameful social failure. Who are they? Young people from the neighborhood. They were not part of Alexander’s friendships. Ergo they are different from us. Are we sure? For every victim there is at least one executioner. What if he was potentially ours too? We never ask ourselves. Bullying children and grandchildren are also immature, elusive and fragile. In them, too, there are abysses that we pass through unaware.
The apparently perfect life of the victim “would have unleashed the hatred and resentment of the executioners”. It is one of the hypotheses being examined by the investigators. Is other people’s happiness such a powerful fuse?
What transforms a “young man of the neighborhood”, an ordinary teenager, a clumsy and beardless boy into an implacable vector of hatred and resentment? When, in a chat, does an emoji change to a deadly imperative?
The sudden awareness of one’s strength – physical or psychological – can trigger the irrepressible desire to make use of it. Or abuse. Emotional illiteracy, a frequent and not always curable prerogative of adolescence, causes short circuits in relationships. Those who cannot call themselves unhappy, envious, frustrated, sad, will seek their voice along the dirty and straight road of aggression and violence.
Bullies feed on the frailty of others. Some get drunk on it until they feel omnipotent. They wrote “Kill yourself” and it really happened. And now it’s over for everyone.