RAGUSA – The 56-year-old who hit the headlines for the story of the simulation of abandonment and the subsequent discovery of the newborn Vittorio Fortunato, whose father he was, in Via Saragat in Ragusa, has died, apparently due to a sudden heart attack. natural. The man was accused of having staged the discovery of the child in November 2020. The story was picked up and relaunched by all the media nationwide.
In January 2023 the man was sentenced to 2 years in prison, with the granting of generic mitigating circumstances, precisely for having staged the abandonment and subsequent discovery of the newborn baby then called Vittorio Fortunato, a few hours after he had been entrusted to her in the middle of the night by his natural mother, resident in Modica, after giving birth to him at home. The conviction came at the preliminary hearing.
According to the expert opinion of the professional in charge, the accused would not have been able to understand, in those frenetic moments in which he staged the accidental discovery of the newborn, that he was left for a few minutes on a sidewalk and then rescued by the man who notified the the police, claiming to have found him by chance after hearing his parents. The episode, which shocked public opinion, as mentioned, occurred in via Saragat, a residential area of Ragusa, on 4 November 2020.
A psychic imbalance caused by the sudden news of being the baby’s father, a circumstance revealed by the mother of the newborn, born, as mentioned, in the Modica home. The woman herself called the man on her phone to tell him to rush to Modica urgently: the latter found her with the newly delivered baby, and took it away with the woman’s consent, deciding what to do along the way.
Basically, according to the report, the stress caused by the unexpected revelation would have made the man act irrationally. But the child, according to the defense, was never actually abandoned. The accused ended up under house arrest a month after the events and was released on 18 January 2021. The child, who had in the meantime been temporarily entrusted to a couple not resident in the Ragusa area, could soon return to his natural mother, as established from the juvenile court of Catania. The man was confident that he would be acquitted before the Court of Appeal of Catania, but instead his sudden death occurred.
