Confirmation came from the highway security cameras, both on the A9 and along the Pedemontana. The two young 29-year-old Swiss residents in a municipality overlooking the Ceresio, in the Lugano area, reached the point on foot where they were then rescued by the Como Traffic Police and by 118 – with the ambulances of the Red Cross of Lurate Caccivio and the Croce Azzurra di Como – in a state of hypothermia and unconscious.
The cameras did not record them on the motorway, neither on foot nor in the car, confirming that the point of the illness (in the territory of the municipality of Villa Guardia) had been reached via the fields. They were found by the Pedemontana maintenance men who had then raised the alarm, lying on the ground just beyond the guardrail.
The reconstruction
The traffic police then reconstructed the day in Como of the Swiss couple, a boy and a girl who lived together. They had arrived in our province by train, reached Lomazzo where they then stayed all day, probably also purchasing narcotics. Then they set off to return to Switzerland, where they probably wanted to arrive on foot. At the junction with the Como ring road, however, they would have taken a wrong turn, at least this is one of the hypotheses being put forward at the moment. They would have thus reached the point where they would have stopped, then found unconscious and in a state of hypothermia due to the cold which has hit our province again in recent days.
The two were saved by the providential passage of the vehicle on the Pedemontana motorway which then raised the alarm to 118 and the traffic police.
The rescue
The couple had been taken to the Sant’Anna hospital under code red, the one of maximum severity, but the clinical picture soon improved. Yesterday, from what was possible to reconstruct, the two were also discharged with a prognosis quantified at five days each.
In short, it went well, in a story that could have ended in a very different and dramatic way. As mentioned, a huge hand in the reconstruction was given by the motorway cameras which never recorded the two walking to get to the point where they were then rescued. It was ruled out from the first moment that they could have arrived by car. The findings finally confirmed that the Ticino boys had in fact reached Como using the train to then reach Lomazzo and go back towards Switzerland.
