He was sent to trial for multiple aggravated vehicular homicide Gaetano Caputi, 30 years old from Bari, held responsible for the road accident which occurred on 11 December 2022 on state road 96 near Modugno and which cost the lives of three very young people: Sara Grimaldi, 19 years old, Elisa Buonsante, 25 years old, and Michele Traetta, 21 years old. A fourth boy was seriously injured. Caputi was driving the car that crashed into a wall “at 120 km per hour”. In recent days the preliminary hearing was held and Caputi’s lawyer had asked abbreviated procedure conditional on an expert opinion on the dynamics of the accident. The request, however, was rejected by the judge who set the first one hearing for the next 3 October, before the single judge Mario Mastromatteo. The prosecutor asked the indictment for the crime of vehicular homicide with aggravating circumstances of having caused the death of several people and of having committed it with “heavy violations of road traffic regulations, specifically speeding, more than double the permitted speed – as well as for the crime of very serious personal road injuries”.
The request of the prosecutor’s office
«Proceeding in the overtaking lane at km 116 of the SS 96 with the direction of travel Altamura at the helm of a Mini One, after the cars preceding him in the same overtaking lane were slowing down in order to allow safe entry into the roadway of a bus that came from a service station – it is written in the documents – for fault consisting of negligence, imprudence (first having not noticed the presence of the bus which had occupied the lane, then having failed to stop its journey in the presence of an obvious dangerous situation), as well as in violation of the rules referred to in article 142 of the Highway Code, having proceeded at a speed much higher than the maximum allowed, that is, at 120 kilometers per hour on a road whose maximum limit was set at 50 km/h, as well as article 148 Cds, which prohibits overtaking from the right, suddenly decided to overtake from the right the cars in front of him and which were stopping and, following this maneuver and the excessive speed, finding the lane blocked by the bus, instead of stopping, he decided to overtake again and in doing so ended up crashing into the same bus».
After the impact, the car was thrown against a reinforced concrete wall about thirty meters away. The family members of the two young women entrusted themselves to and were assisted by Studio3A-Valore SpA, a company specialized at national level in compensation for damages and the protection of citizens’ rights, with the collaboration of the lawyer Fabio Ferrara, of the Bari Court. And Studio3A.
