Pistoia, 15 June 2024 – The last thing that Ottavina Maestripieri he saw it was the face of his son, Patrizio Ruscio, who pounced on her, while she was still in her bed, before suffocating to death at the hands of the person she had helped despite all her problems throughout her life. It was dawn on June 1st a year ago. Ottavina had recently turned 90, a life made of sacrifices, which had led her to achieve a fair amount of well-being, also thanks to that wedding favor shop in Via Monteverdi, opened right under her house, which had made her known and appreciated. in the city. An inheritance that the family had enjoyed for a while, but which had then been largely squandered by her son, Patrizio Ruscio, an accountant, who over time had racked up debts and legal troubles. She had always helped him, giving him everything he had. She had never told him no. Never until that morning. He was there to tell her that the money had run out, including hers to pay the rent on that house and perhaps to ask her for some. He was born of it an argument. Finally, he had suffocated her, killing “the person who had always helped him”, as he himself would have said before her judges: she had defended herself to the last, wounding him in her face.
For that terrible murder, yesterday afternoon, Patrizio Ruscio, now 61 years old, was convicted in the first instance to twenty-three years in prison. The judges of the Court of Assizes of Florence, president Silvia Cipriani, read the sentence after two hours of deliberation. Ruscio himself was present in the courtroom, with his lawyer Francesco Stefani from Florence.
The public prosecutor Leonardo De Gaudio, who directed the investigations of the Carabinieri of the Operations Department of the Provincial Command and of the Pistoia Station, at the end of his indictment yesterday morning, had asked for a sentence of twenty-two years: twenty-one years for the voluntary homicide , increased by one year per the crime of tax evasion and improper use of credit cards. Therefore, starting from the maximum sentence for this crime, the aggravating factors (the kinship with the victim and the impaired defense) were recognized as equivalent to the generic mitigating factors. As will be remembered, on the morning of June 1st a year ago, Patrizio Ruscio went out at dawn, violating the house arrest to which he was subjected in execution of another sentence and showed up in the house where his mother lived and of which he had the keys. He escaped from house arrest again five days later, when the Carabinieri showed up at his house to notify him of the aggravation of the measure decided by the Surveillance Court of Florence, in light of the first escape. After the crime, he then used his mother’s Postepay to withdraw a few hundred euros.
“A sentence which we expected in the first instance – commented the lawyer Stefani – We will appeal, to request that the prevalence of the mitigating factors be recognized over the aggravating circumstances. Furthermore, we have initiated the compensation agreement towards the victim’s grandchildren.”
