“And now you’re going to say that Sofia committed suicide, in that cursed tub?” Busy holding back tears at every hearing (many stages of an ordeal), in the end Vanna Broia couldn’t hold back her anger and shouted yesterday in the courtroom in Lucca against a reconstruction that sounded to her like an outrage. The defense experts were talking about her Sofia, her little girl who was taken away from her forever five years ago in the Texas baths in Marina di Pietrasanta. It was a Saturday of celebration: it became a tragedy for a life in the time it took for her to drown in a whirlpool. It was July 13 and the little girl was declared dead after four days of agony at the Opa in Massa, but in reality she was already gone when a doctor there tried to revive her at the edge of the tub.
According to the prosecution, it was the suction nozzle of the system that held Sofia Bernkopf down, after having trapped her long hair. Such was its power that – according to the consultants of the prosecutor Salvatore Giannino and Stefano Grolla, the lawyer from Vicenza of the Bernkopf couple who joined the civil action – not even an adult would have been able to free themselves. To pull the twelve-year-old from Parma out of that 80-centimeter deep abyss, it was necessary to tear out a piece of scalp along with the trapped lock. According to the defense’s medical examiners, Edoardo Franchi and Martina Fogardi, Sofia instead lost consciousness, drowning after a head trauma caused by an unknown impact (which no one witnessed). A reconstruction that does not take into account the hair sucked up by the nozzle. The theory is instead based on a hematoma found in the child’s temporal area. And it was when this was discussed that Sofia’s mother could no longer resist. “No, madam, don’t do that,” Judge Gianluca Massaro told her in a calm voice, while she came out in tears after her outburst, reassured by the attorney general’s officer present in the courtroom.
The hearing lasted over seven hours. Tough, battle-like, with engineers Orsini and Massaro, consultants for the Prosecutor’s Office and civil party alongside Giannino and Grolla busy dismantling the opposing party’s reconstructions. The hematoma on the child’s temple was there, in fact. But it has a medical explanation that does not necessarily connect it to trauma, as the little girl’s father, Edoardo Bernkopf, a surgeon as well as a dentist, knows well. Sofia was kept alive for four days thanks to extracorporeal circulation which involves the administration of massive doses of anticoagulants. Her entire body was covered in hematomas in addition to the one highlighted by the defense’s experts. And it cannot even be ruled out that the little girl, in a desperate attempt to free herself from what was holding her under water, shook her head, hitting the submerged wall of the pool.
Seven defendants have been charged with various counts of aggravated manslaughter in the tragedy, which would have been eight if the death of patriarch Edo Cafissi had not occurred in 2022 at the age of 95. According to witnesses, at 91 (therefore before the tragedy) he had also lost much of his mental and physical strength due to a very serious accident.
Two of the defendants made spontaneous statements yesterday. Giampiero Livi did so to reiterate his lack of involvement in the management of Texas (that he had a role was instead supported by several witnesses in previous hearings), while Thomas Bianchi, 19 at the time of the events, spoke to refresh everyone’s memory of his working conditions, including grueling shifts and “hazing” practices suffered by older lifeguards. Bianchi is accused with his sisters Elisabetta and Simonetta Cafissi, owners of the establishment, their respective husbands and employers, Livi and Mario Assuero Marchi, the experienced lifeguard Emanuele Fulceri and Enrico Lenzi, supplier of the facility.
A plant for which someone had also certified the conformity and safety. In recent days, the two technicians who had issued the certification – much contested by the prosecution and Grolla – were entered in the register of suspects. Soon, they should be questioned to understand on the basis of which elements they signed the certificate.
At the end of the hearing, Edoardo Bernkopf commented that “in addition to little Sofia, a victim of the Cafissis’ actions, it would also seem that the lifeguard Bianchi was used in the Cafissi defense as the only scapegoat: he did not rescue my daughter, but in fact, he had not been put by the owners in a position to guarantee the safety of the bathers”. The next hearing, on July 15, will serve to schedule the next stages of the trial. The verdict will be in September.
Roberto Longoni
