Rome, May 5, 2021 – Sentence to life imprisonment for Finnegan Lee Elder and for Gabriel Natale Hjorth, found guilty of the death of the deputy brigadier of the carabinieri Mario Cerciello Rega: it was decided by the First Court of Assizes of Rome after more 13 hours of council chamber. The court also ordered approximately one million euros as a provisional immediately enforceable in favor of the civil parties e two months of daytime isolation for the condemned.
In the bunker room of Rebibbia, at the reading of the device, the family of the deputy sergeant and the widow Rosa Maria Exile, who burst into tears at the reading of the sentence. The woman, who was present at all the hearings of the trial, after reading the device, hugged her lawyer and her husband’s family crying.
The widow: Mario, servant of the state
“It was a long and painful process. This will not bring Mario back to me – comments Rosa Maria Esilio – It will not bring him back to life, he will not give us back our life together. But today the first stone has been laid for a new justice and Mario represents the precedent to which those in need can appeal. His integrity was defended and it is demonstrated despite having had to undergo many insinuations as a victim. “Then he adds:” We can only thank the complicated work of the judges, the lawyers and all the people who stood by Mario because they knew him, because he was the son and carabiniere of all. I thank all the people who believed in his being a wonderful husband and man and a servant of the state who deserves only the respect and honor that he himself demonstrated as a martyr. “
From you the lawyer Franco Coppi, lawyer of the civil party of the family of the slain deputy brigadier, commented: “A severe sentence but corresponding to the atrocious crime that was committed. It is a penalty appropriate to the gravity of the fact for the two defendants gave no sign of repentance“.
The defenders of the two twenty-year-olds: shame on Italy
The lawyer Renato Borzone, Finnegan Lee Elder’s defender, has very harsh words: “This sentence represents a shame for Italy, with judges who do not want to see what emerged during the investigation and the trial. never seen something so unworthy. We will appeal: here is a 19-year-old boy who was attacked. We have seen the usual tandem of prosecutors and judges “.
He echoes him Francesco Petrelli, who with his colleague Fabio Alonzi defended Christian Gabriel Natale Hjorth: “It is a sentence unfair, incorrect and incomprehensible, which will in no way stand up to an appeal. “Then he confesses:” It was the most demanding defense I had to face. I have done many trials in the Court of Assizes with requests for life imprisonment and it has also often happened to me to defend very young defendants, but never as in this case have the two things overlapped in such a dramatic way. How much it was the accusatory hypothesis is unfounded according to which Gabriel Natale would have participated in the murder of the poor deputy brigadier Cerciello – he adds – is also demonstrated by the fact that the prosecutor, the magistrate and the same plaintiffs have each time hypothesized and indicated a different form of competition and willful misconduct: moral, material, direct, possible “
And again: “The murder of the poor deputy sergeant was instead a fact totally alien to him, completely atypical, unexpected and unpredictable, the result of a fatal chain of events that could not be blamed on him in any way. It is for this reason that I have passionately defended Gabriel since the beginning of his innocence “.
The reconstruction of the murder
They have passed almost two years from the murder of the deputy brigadier of the carabinieri Mario Cerciello Rega, killed with eleven stab wounds in the Prati district in Rome. It was the night of July 26, 2019 when the carabiniere, on duty with his colleague Andrea Varriale, was killed a few hundred meters from the hotel where two young Americans were staying, Finnegan Lee Elder and Christian Gabriel Natale Hjorth, arrested a few hours after the crime on charges of being the perpetrators of the murder.
The deputy brigadier, that night, together with colleague Varriale was in via Pietro Cossa to retrieve the bag that the two Americans had taken away from Sergio Brugiatelli in Trastevere, ‘intermediary’ with the pushers to which Elder and Hjorth had turned to buy cocaine and actually received tachipirine. The two young Americans, after the backpack theft, they had organized a ‘return horse’ to get money and drugs back. But they had introduced themselves to the appointment the two carabinieri in civilian clothes and Cerciello died under the stab wounds inflicted by Elder.
The two nineteen years old after the murder they returned to the Meridien hotel in via Federico Cesi where they were identified and arrested. In the hotel room the investigators also found theThe knife used to hit Cerciello, hidden in the false ceiling. Thanks to the intense investigations of the Carabinieri of the Investigative Unit, led by Colonel Lorenzo D’Aloia, the Public Prosecutor of Rome, with the prosecutor Michele Prestipino and the adjunct Nunzia D’Elia, asked for and obtained the immediate judgment for the two Americans who ended up on trial before the judges of the Court of Assizes.
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