The mother and father are under investigation for manslaughter. An assignment given to the medical examiner Giuseppe Ragazzi of Catania and to the pediatrician neonatologist Eloisa Gitto of Messina by the Ragusa Prosecutor’s Office will have to further clarify aspects already documented in the evidentiary incident and during the autopsy. These are the causes of death of a 6-month-old girl who died on 20 October 2023 at Vittoria hospital. The task was conferred by the prosecutor in charge of the investigation, Ottavia Polipo, on May 29th and the deadline for filing the report is 90 days.
As will be remembered, it was the judge for preliminary investigations who appointed the medical examiner, Maria Francesca Berlich, during the evidentiary stage, with the task of ascertaining the causes, the time of death and the position assumed by the little girl before her death. occurred at Vittoria hospital. It would not have been a sudden death or cot death, but the death would have occurred from another cause. The little girl, according to what the lawyers Massimo Garofalo and Gianluca Nobile, who defend the parents under investigation, had reported – based on the findings – died, according to the expert, due to a “cardiocirculatory arrest consecutive to serious cardio-respiratory insufficiency due to bronchopneumonia caused by aspiration (ab ingestis) of milk”.
The parents are being investigated for manslaughter for having put the baby to sleep in the cot in a prone position and with a pacifier, after the baby had been fed, without waiting for the baby to digest. But the “stomach down” position in which the baby was apparently sleeping until the father realized that something was wrong could have “favored the so-called cot death syndrome, which is not conceivable in this case”, he writes. the expert.
According to the news of the time, the father had found the little girl in the crib, with blue lips; hence the rush to the hospital where the little girl died shortly after. When the little girl was just a few weeks old, in May 2023 she had already been hospitalized in Vittoria for a problem that the lawyers report was similar and she had spent almost a month in neonatal intensive care at Giovanni Paolo II in Ragusa; hence the hypothesis of a neurological pathology connected to the difficulty of correct swallowing
