5 years and 4 months in abbreviated form. This is the sentence given to a woman and her partner for having reduced her disabled son to the brink of death. The young man had been deprived of food for so long, he writes the Republic, weighing 30 kilos at twenty years old, with obvious marks and bruises on his body, rope marks on his hands and feet with which he had been tied and worms coming out of his ears. “A dramatic case: it would have been a matter of hours, not days, and this boy would have died,” said deputy prosecutor Cesare Parodi. It was the doctors, who feared they would not be able to save him, who requested the intervention of the judiciary. The twenty-year-old remained hospitalized for about two months, and then taken to a residential community.
Testimony of neighbors: “He was rummaging through the garbage”
According to the indictment, the boy «was subjected to a series of violent conduct, which occurred «by hitting him repeatedly but also by being forced to the bed with belts, abuse, material deprivation of food» and «by making him live in terrible hygienic conditions», so much so as to have determined the clinical picture found in the hospital on 7 August 2021. The neighbors had also testified that they had seen him enter their property to rummage through the garbage in search of anything to eat. The fact that he had two sisters makes it clear for the prosecution that there was «a specific choice to behave like this only with him. And we don’t even care if there might have been a reason behind such a sensational disparity. No reason in the world justifies something like this”, said Parodi who had asked for six years in prison for both of them.
Mistreatment and injuries
Now the two will have to answer for mistreatment and injuries. The judges also ordered the suspension of parental authority for the mother who, before the closing speech, said she “loved” her son and “did not want to see her ex-partner anymore”. The court also ordered a provisional sum of 25 thousand euros for the boy, protected as a civil party by the lawyer Emanuela Martini.
