Posted on June 7, 2022
“No sentence will ever fill the void it has left”. These are the only words Daniele’s father said after reading the sentence.
By Daniele De Santis, massacred together with the whip Eleonora Manta by Antonio De Marco.
The ferocious murderer was sentenced to life imprisonment, the young student guilty of the murder of the Lecce referee and his beloved, killed out of envy on the evening of 21 September 2020 in their home in via Montello, in Lecce, which for months had shared with him, renting him a room. The sentence was pronounced today by the judges of the Court of Assizes.
“I made a fool of myself, I know I was wrong. I killed them because they were too happy and for this I got angry, ”said De Marco when he was arrested. But his had been a premeditated murder, organized for a long time, so much so that in the backpack he carried with him on the day of the murder, some zip ties were found with which he had planned to tie the victims to torture them and a notebook with notes as well as “Do not leave traces of blood”. The reaction of those who had become his prey probably derailed the even more cruel plan of making them suffer long before killing them.
For De Marco, daytime isolation was not arranged for a year as the Prosecutor had requested, which instead saw the request for life imprisonment accepted. Neither De Marco nor his parents were present in the courtroom. Instead, there were the relatives of the victims.
The bunker room of the Borgo “San Nicola” prison is a flood of emotions and feelings that explode after months of waiting, almost exhausting silence and suffering. There is neither the strength nor the desire to rage against the murderer among the families of the two boys killed with 79 stab wounds on their first day of living together in the condominium in via Montello, a stone’s throw from the Lecce railway station.
The hearing had begun with an unexpected event. An alternate popular judge was declared forfeited for having released, shortly before the hearing began, an interview with some TV stations, making – it was explained – personal assessments on the outcome of the trial. The President of the Court Pietro Baffa ordered the forfeiture due to incompatibility.
The prosecutor Maria Consolata Moschettini did not want to reply to the defensive arguments of the last hearing. The prosecutor had already invoked life imprisonment with the recognition of the aggravating circumstance of cruelty and premeditation, and daytime solitary confinement for a year.
De Marco has always chosen to desert all hearings without ever appearing in the presence of judges and relatives of the victims to recite a mea culpa that who knows how much it would have served to sweeten the feelings of the boys’ families and wrest the clemency of the Court once closed in Council chamber.
De Marco, in recent months, has only presented himself in front of doctor Elio Serra and psychiatrist Pasquale Carabellese (professor of criminology at the University of Bari) because the two partisan experts had to evaluate his ability to understand and want to undermine , according to his lawyers, from an existence (albeit so short) studded with love disappointments that would have destabilized him to the point of identifying in the young couple the easiest targets and closest to him on which to pour out his “life pain “And his” jealousy “on the evening of 21 September 2020.
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