Those experienced in Viale Firenze on the afternoon of Wednesday 8 May were moments of apprehension. It was more or less 4.30 pm when the single emergency number received a call reporting the presence of a woman who had barricaded herself in the house and was throwing furniture and furnishings from the window of an apartment on the third floor of a building a few steps from the Liberation Bridge. Objects also ended up on cars parked right under the building, some of which were seriously damaged before being moved by the police. The police, local police, carabinieri and firefighters intervened. Once they arrived on site, the police – coordinated by the manager of the Foligno police station, the deputy commissioner Adriano Felici – took steps to turn off the gas and then attempted to communicate with the lady, a woman in her early sixties who lived alone in the apartment. An attempt which, however, was not successful, not even with the help of relatives who in the meantime had reached Viale Firenze.
To avoid the risk that the woman could make some reckless gesture, an inflatable mattress was mounted under the window from which the sixty-year-old had started throwing objects, including chairs, pots and even food. Given the presence of multiple windows, however, it was also necessary to install a second mattress, which arrived from the Terni fire brigade command. After waiting for the right moment to intervene, when the lady had calmed down – while a policeman observed her movements from a building opposite – a group of firefighters, with the help of the ladder truck, first reached the balcony of the apartment and then one of the windows. In the meantime, some officers together with the deputy commissioner Felici entered the building and, with the keys that had been given to them by his son, opened the door of the apartment. Once inside, the woman approached him in a non-aggressive manner, but still very agitated. After immobilizing her, the 118 staff intervened and took the sixty-year-old into care and took her to hospital.
During the operations, many people gathered in the area and traffic along Viale Firenze was slowed down to allow the intervention of the police and rescuers.
