«If you don’t disappear I’ll beat you», «Kill yourself». These are some of the messages that Davide Falcetta sent in 2016 to his girlfriend Claudia De Chirico (in the photo), 22 years old, who committed suicide in December of that year.
They have only been analyzed now because, at the time, a sergeant had not placed them in the file. But they sound like confirmation of the pressure on the young woman. The girl was found hanging from a railway underpass in Terlizzi, in the province of Bari, at dawn on 23 December 2016. She had the cell phone charger cable around her neck. Passing motorists raised the alarm. The girl was wearing an elegant dress because the day before she had been at a wedding at the end of which she had had a violent argument with her boyfriend. Fascetta had in fact confirmed that the two often argued even for trivial reasons, adding that Claudia, more than once, had threatened suicide “to scare him”.
On the night of December 22, after the argument, he left her alone, drunk and injured, on the street, and then went to sleep. The new investigations have been reopened to understand if in some way Claudia’s extreme gesture was foreseeable in that crisis situation.
After eight years, the judge of Trani, Marina Chiddo, ordered the forced indictment for death as a consequence of mistreatment in the family, rejecting the fourth request for dismissal presented by the Prosecutor’s Office. Among the other messages found, the girl had written several times to her best friend: “Davide raised his hands”.
According to the judge, the 22-year-old took her own life due to “the progressive nullification of her own person in which she had come to find herself as a result of the oppressive, violent and threatening conduct carried out by her cohabiting partner”.
The boy had downplayed the extent of the latest argument, explaining that Claudia had only gotten angry because he was looking at the Brazilian dancers present at the party. But her friends, interviewed individually, confirm that her arguments were frequent, and Fascetta’s threats were frequent as well. As well as, apparently, the beatings.
However, Claudia did not leave him, even if her friends encouraged her to do so, for fear of being alone.
Now the messages.
Which would demonstrate, according to the investigating judge, a situation of mistreatment which would have led to such a state of prostration and subjugation in Claudia as to induce her to choose death as the only possibility “to escape the continuous suffering suffered”.
