The belief that he had been wronged, a morbid attachment to his daughter who complained of having suffered damage due to a wrong physiotherapy procedure, little faith in justice and the idea of having to take justice into his own hands. It is in this context that he would mature the murder of Mauro Di Giacomothe 63-year-old physiotherapist murdered by gunshots on the evening of Monday 18 December last in the car park a few steps from his home in the Poggiofranco district of Bari. According to what the investigations ascertained, the shooter was Salvatore Vassalli, 59 years old, a worker construction worker with a clean criminal record from Canosa di Puglia father of a young woman who in 2020 filed a civil lawsuit against the physiotherapist accused of having caused her an arm disability the year before. An injury that investigators describe as comparable to ‘a strong blow from the whip’ and which over the years had reduced, causing, according to the expert, a disability of 3%. The man was arrested on charges of murder aggravated by premeditation and cruelty.
That evening, armed with a gun that has not yet been found, he waited for the physiotherapist to return home, approached him in the parking lot and confronted him first verbally and then unloading the magazine at him and then raging with the butt of the gun, hitting him several times in the head . Several witnesses saw the scene although they were unable to identify the attacker. It took months of investigations by the Bari flying squad, coordinated by the Prosecutor’s Office, to get to him. And to do so, the investigators started from the images of a video camera that filmed a suspicious car at an intersection not far from the place of the murder. In addition to the car model, a dark Hyundai I 10, compatible with the one described by the witnesses, only two license plate numbers were visible. T
This was enough and little by little, by excluding other owners of similar cars and by cross-referencing that data with that of the telephone cells connected in the area and along the escape of the car towards Canosa di Puglia, it was possible to trace the man who was arrested on the basis to a precautionary custody order issued by investigating judge Nicola Bonante. Difficult investigations also because – it was explained in the press conference by the prosecutor Roberto Rossi, the deputies Ciro Angelillis and Matteo Soave and the head of the Mobile Filippo Portoghese – in addition to the unfounded rumors and ‘gossip’ that had spread about the victim’s private life, it was An anonymous letter was found which risked misleading investigators.
In the end the legal dispute with Vassalli’s daughter was discovered and all the pieces fell into place. The man, who is married and also the father of another daughter, is the only person under investigation in the matter. “The constant delegitimization of judges and the judicial system – said prosecutor Rossi – entails the risk of using violence to be right. If we think that we can do without judges or that judges as a category do not respond to questions of justice, the effect is the Wild West, the idea that you can take justice into your own hands, and it’s a very dangerous culture.”
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