The Udine prosecutor’s office has opened an information file on the three boys missing after being overwhelmed by the current of the Natisone river on May 31st. Chief prosecutor Massimo Lia confirmed this to Messaggero Veneto. The investigation is currently without suspects or hypotheses of crime. The searches for Cristian Casian Molnar, 25 years old, Patrizia Cormos, 20 years old, and Bianca Doros, 23 years old, have been going on for almost 48 hours now and the hopes of finding the three boys alive are increasingly reduced. One of the inevitable steps for the prosecutor’s office will be to ascertain which and how many errors were committed before the young people disappeared swallowed by the river. And possibly identify responsibilities once the facts have been ascertained.
What weighs on the matter are first of all the various mistakes that the boys themselves committed before going into the water. That day the three had decided to take a trip to the river to celebrate and enjoy some relaxation. The 20-year-old Cormos, resident in Basaldella di Campoformido and enrolled in the second year of the Academy of Fine Arts in Udine, had just passed a test for access to an exam scheduled for July. The 23-year-old Doros had arrived from Romania just three days before her and had joined her parents, who live in Udine. The 25-year-old Molnar, Patrizia Cormos’ boyfriend, arrived from Austria where he lives with his brother and wanted to finally spend some time with his partner.
One couldn’t swim
From the first reconstructions gathered so far, the boys arrived at the river at around 1.20pm on Friday 31 May. When they parked the car and started going down towards the riverbed, Repubblica recalls, it was sunny and there was no water on the scree. The three would not have had any suspicion that a flood would arrive shortly. The dramatic images from 2pm on Friday with the failed rescue attempt on the boys, before they disappeared, had led people to think that at least one of them, Patrizia Cormos, did not know how to swim. And it would have been someone who knew the girl who confirmed it to the mayor of Premariacco: «Those guys found themselves in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Without realizing what was happening around them.”
The panic
Within a few minutes the water level rose and so did the strength of the current, after the rains of the previous hours which had swollen the river. As the bus driver who first saw the boys in difficulty and raised the alarm said, the three seemed “panicked”. And they would not have realized that from that sort of island on which they remained there were barely two meters separating them from the shore. At that moment, according to the man, the water was not yet too high and would have just reached his torso. But the boys wouldn’t have felt like wading into the river.
The yellow of the signs
It is possible that the three did not know the area well, hence the choice to spend time near that river. In summer, many people come to that stretch to stay on that pebble beach. And just when there is a greater flow of people in the warmer season, that area is also full of signs warning of the ban on bathing and the risk of drowning. But it is not yet clear whether those signs were there and whether they were seen when the three boys decided to enjoy some relaxation near the Natisone river.
