Patrizio Ruscio, 61, the accountant from Pistoia who on 1 June 2023 killed his mother, Ottavina Maestripieri, 90, suffocating her with a pillow, was sentenced in the first degree assize court to 23 years in prison. The sentence, as reported by La Nazione and Il Tirreno, was read on Friday afternoon.
Ruscio, who immediately confessed to the murder, heard the sentence in the courtroom. The woman, a former shopkeeper, well known in the city, had recently turned 90. Her son, who had accumulated debts and legal troubles over time, had gone to his mother’s house that morning to ask her for money, as he had already done other times in the past. During an argument – this is her reconstruction, perhaps in an attempt to silence her mother, who perhaps had started screaming, her son placed a pillow over her face, suffocating her. It was Ruscio himself who called for help. The judges of the Florence Assize Court pronounced the sentence on Friday afternoon after two hours of deliberation. At the end of the indictment, prosecutor Leonardo De Gaudio had asked for a 22-year sentence: 21 years for the voluntary homicide, increased by one year for the crime of escape, since in the Ruscio affair he was under house arrest while carrying out another sentence, and for improper use of credit cards because after committing the crime he would have used his mother’s Postepay to withdraw a few hundred euros.
