Rome, 4 May 2024 – They have it first knocked to the ground, pressing his face against the asphalt with his knee of the agent pressed against the neck, the same maneuver that killed the African American George Floyd in Minnesota, and they arrested him. Then once in a transit cell at the station North Miami Beach police, four of them hogtied him and subjected him to Hogtie restraint. With a strap they have tied his feet to handcuffs behind his back and pulled, pulled between heartbreaking and superhuman screams until Matteo Falcinelli, 25 year old Italian student, he begged them to stop because he literally felt like he was breaking. “Please, please, please” words pronounced in a faint voice between tears and unspeakable heartbreak. And so, with the risk of dying, they left him for more than thirteen minutes, when someone in that position stops breathing just after 150 seconds.
Matteo Falcinelli inside the Miami police station in a frame from the officers’ bodycams
It is the ordeal that is difficult to describe, impossible to understand, to which a man was subjected boy originally from Spoletoin the United States to attend the master’s degree from Florida International University (at the Biscayne Bay Campus), by the American police. Always in the eye of the storm for repeated abuses which have often turned out to be real tragedies and have set public opinion on fire all over the world.
The scenes of violence that we tell are all taken in its dramatic crudeness from bodycams worn by officerseven the one inside the police station, which Falcinelli’s American lawyer managed to obtain from the prosecutor’s office only on 12 April as part of the processwhich effectively ended with admission to the PTI (Pre trail intervention), a sort of re-educational programme.
A bitter story that begins there night between 24 and 25 February but that Matteo’s family wanted to report only now that the young man has accepted the program ordered by the judge that the four charges will be dropped for resisting a public official, resisting arrest without violence and trespassing. Accusations for which the 25-year-old had been arrested during a night-time intervention in a club by off-duty officers will emerge from the report. First the Falcinellis were afraid of retaliation.
What exactly happened that night will be a matter of investigation: the family wants to file a formal complaint about the abusethe untruthful statements made under oath, the unlawful arrest and torture suffered by the young man and invoking the Fourth Amendment.
From the first reconstruction of the family it emerges that Matteo enters the room around 10.15pm: he is alone, out of sorts after a bad accident the previous November and doesn’t go out with friends for spring break. He orders a drink, rum and coke, but soon realizes it’s a strip bar, he’ll tell later. Some girls offer him sex: 500 euros for half an hour, a thousand for an hour but he refuses. And in fact, looking at the website of the club north of Miami, it advertises a bar for men’s entertainment with the most beautiful women in South Florida.
The boy stays at the counter and before leaving to go to the bathroom orders another drink for him and a girl he meets on the spot. In the bathroom he notices that his two cell phones are missing. He starts looking for them, asks where they are, and after an agitated search the same girl tells him that his cell phones were found at the entrance to the bar. Matteo goes to collect them, and only afterwards return to the bar to get drinks previously ordered. The drinks were already ready on the counter, she drinks them together with the girl and from here on memories become blurred. He doesn’t remember how he will get to the exit but there is already a police patrol there with two officers, as emerges from the official report, another four will arrive only later. The police will write that they intervened because the boy caused problems in the club so much so that he was thrown out and resisted arrest, resisting the officers because he wanted the $500 he spent back but Matteo claims he never paid that amount.
What happens outside is partly filmed by bodycams. Matteo is agitated, he rails against the police: repeats that he didn’t do anything, asks to get his phones back. He asks for the names of the officers because he wants to report them but when he points his finger – this is his reconstruction – at the name tag printed on his uniform, he is knocked to the ground. “Don’t touch us otherwise there will be trouble” they threaten him. It is at that point that Falcinelli ends up on the ground with his hands behind his back and the policeman’s knee pressing on his neck. Shortly afterwards the same images postpone the arrival of one of the bouncers who He brings the two cell phones back to the officers. They will be placed next to the boy forced to the ground: the very ones that Matteo wanted back. It is now 3.38 in the morning. Falcinelli is taken to the police station. That’s where the torture happens. A policeman’s body cam shows the student inside a cell with glass windows: he screams asking for his rights to be respected. “I don’t have rights?” he shouts.
Immediately afterwards, three policemen burst in, then the fourth wearing the camera who puts on a pair of black latex gloves. Matteo is thrown to the ground, they tie his ankles with a belt, they tighten his handcuffs with keys and connect the strap tightly to your hands. They pull him forcefully and then leave him on his side but the boy ends up on his stomach again while the officers close the cell. During the day he is taken to prison, first to hospital.
College friends will find him in the following hours. When they don’t see him, they call the hospitals and finally search the online site where all arrests in the States are recorded. There’s his mug shot: his face bleeding of the boy, the personal data and the indication of the race: white. Bail has already been set for two of the four crimes he is accused of: $500 each. Friends will pay 3-4 thousand dollars and Tuesday 27 February Matteo is free but in shock. A few hours later he was hospitalized for two days in a hospital due to his injuries. Subsequently, on February 29 he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital for five days after multiple suicide attempts occurred as a result of torture. Her college friends will be able to warn her mother by finding her number on Matteo’s computer. Vlasta Studenicova, the student’s Italian-Slovakian mother rushes to Miami as soon as possible where he still is to assist his son and prepare the complaint against the American police. “I’m ready to chain myself, what they did to Matteo must never happen again”
