“I’ve been doing this job for twenty years. I’ve seen some missing … Mushroom hunters who get lost in the woods, people who want to end it all. Maybe it’s just a suggestion, but this case is strange, it’s different ». At the entrance to the barracks of the volunteer firefighters of Casorate Primo, in the Pavia area, there is an Alpine Rescue doctor who takes a break after a full day spent beating the fields far and wide in search of any small trace of Giacomo Sartori, the 29-year-old computer technician, originally from Mel in the Belluno area, but who lives and works in Milan, vanished into thin air in the night between last Friday and Saturday. No cricket in his head, a hard worker, employee of the Assago Software Center, that evening Giacomo suffered, for the second time in a few months, the theft of his backpack while he was with friends in the Vineria 2 wine shop in viale Vittorio Veneto in Milan. Inside the documents, credit cards, two PCs (work and personal) and the company cell phone. The more the days pass, the more the yellow around the young man’s disappearance thickens.
One kilometer from this barracks, used as a command post to organize searches, the boy’s car was found on Wednesday, a gray Polo, clean, all in order, perfectly closed. «Even in the worst case scenario, it is strange that the boy came right here by chance from Milan – the rescuer sighs -, from what his family say, he does not know the area, he has never attended it. The last call he made to his brother on the night between Friday and Saturday, to which he did not answer. Then nothing more ». A call that, however, is not confirmed by the telephone records in the hands of the carabinieri, unless it was made on whatsapp or through other apps. Giacomo’s personal cell phone, the one he still had with him, hooked up the cell phone of Casorate Primo at 2.30 on Saturday night, at 7.30 in the morning that of Motta Visconti, three kilometers from here. No phone calls were recorded, only data traffic. So much so that one of the hypotheses of the investigators, coordinated by the prosecutor Ilaria Perinu, is that, being among other things a computer expert, Giacomo was able to locate the company cell phone, and that maybe he was right here. But it is only a hypothesis that to date has no comparisons.
That night the 29-year-old wandered these streets, from one village to another. After greeting friends in the Milan winery at 11pm (the carabinieri told that he was angry about the theft of his backpack, but he had no exaggerated reactions) a camera near the restaurant framed him as he was leaving. What he did next is a mystery. At 2.20 am he passed the Binasco motorway exit. Strange that he chose to take the highway and not the highway at that deserted hour, also because he had no money with him. But perhaps he was in a hurry: the non-payment receipt was found in his car.
Giacomo traveled for a long time in these countries, as if in search of someone, of something. His car was filmed by several cameras: the last one near the Motta Visconti cemetery at 7.15 am. To find the Polo parked here, in front of the Bereguardo canal, forty centimeters of water cutting fields, trees, and farmhouses, the owner of the Caiella farmhouse. “I first noticed it on Sunday evening. Here there were a lot of people, inside we do the yoga class. When they all left I saw her but hardly noticed. On Monday we were closed – he says -, on Tuesday the car was still here. Wednesday morning when I saw her again I became suspicious: I thought it had been stolen and I called 112 ».
Behind the farmhouse, there is also a bed and breakfast and that night it was full: could he have come to meet some guests? It is one of the many unanswered questions in this story full of mystery, in which as the hours go by it is increasingly difficult not to think of a tragic ending.
With bated breath, for two days, Giacomo’s mother, father, and brother Tommaso have been wandering through the fields with the rescuers and participating in the searches that “for the moment have been concentrated within a kilometer”, explain the police officers. fire that work tirelessly with the help of civil protection, mountain rescue, on foot and on horseback, with dogs, drones and even a helicopter. At the moment there is no trace of Giacomo, however.
It happened, among other things, that, just beyond the canal, in front of another partially ruined but inhabited farmhouse, in the afternoon also a Rai crew suffered a theft. Someone, a stone’s throw from the firefighters and civil protection cars, broke the window glass and took away the backpack with the camera and the equipment. “Here occasionally runners and cyclists are stolen from parked cars,” says a local who passes by on a bicycle. “Of course it is strange that it happened just today, with all the people who are here.”