Pescara murder, the witness: ‘While they were killing Thomas they told him ‘shut up”

“I was shocked, I wanted to stop them but I didn’t know how. It seemed like they were out of their minds.” This is the story of the witness who witnessed the murder of 17-year-old Thomas Luciani, killed with 25 stab wounds in a park in Pescara due to a debt of a few hundred euros linked to drug issues. Crime for which two teenagers were arrested who – according to the witness – said “shut up” to the victim while he was on the ground dying. “Despite what happened, we went to the seaside to swim – explained the witness – and there one of the two alleged murderers” got rid of the knife that he had wrapped in a blood-stained sock, leaving it behind the rocks”.

Murder for a “matter of respect”

“He said that for him it had become a question of respect”, we read in the reports of the interrogations to which the other children involved in the affair were subjected on Sunday night. When the boys are asked why one of the two arrested hit the victim with a knife despite having no credit towards him, the answer is “because they are friends”. And a risk of premeditation emerges because there is also talk of the knife already in the backpack and shown to the others already at the station, together with a change of clothes that will be used after the murder, the other suspect seen with a small gun in his hand, and the attempts of one of the two suspects to intimidate the other kids “while we were walking I think he said that this had to remain between the five of us”, and above all the obvious shock of the other witnesses: “I didn’t react in any way. Thomas was almost death sounds and they told him to shut up… I was shocked, I didn’t know what to do, I wanted to stop them but I didn’t know how. While they were doing it, it seemed like they were out of their minds.” On the use of drugs, as a probable contributing cause of the facts, one of the witnesses was clear: “I didn’t smoke drugs. While we were together they didn’t use drugs. Afterwards they smoked grass, but not me”.

One of the suspects “had a gun that I think was unloaded”

A second witness, heard after the boy who reported how the suspects tried to silence the victim as he was about to die, says that C., one of the two arrested for the murder, “had a gun that I think was unloaded”. After meeting the others in the group at the central station of Pescara, he explains that he learned from friends that “Cristopher had escaped from a community, who explained to me that he owed money to M., I think 240 euros, and that, recently, he had lent him another 70 euros. I think it was drug debts. They saw this boy near a bar and M. and F. took him and took him behind White Bakery and we talked to each other in a circle.” The boy did not witness the murder but after a while he saw the first witness arrive “shocked, completely yellow in the face, who told us not to go where M. was because the boy was on the ground making us understand that he had been stunned.”

The Commissioner: “We need to understand the dynamics and whether it is an isolated case”

“We have a whole series of elements that must make us understand whether it is an isolated case or whether it is something that interested several young people and instead developed as an epilogue only towards this poor young victim. The conduct, that lack of empathy , even later, frankly left us dismayed”, explains the Police Commissioner of Pescara, Carlo Solimene, to the microphones of Sky TG24. “We still need to acquire a whole series of images and photograms that should help us better understand the composition of this group, we need to better understand where they came from.”

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The mother of one of those arrested: “I can only pray”

The mother – lawyer – of one of the two arrested minors, a The Corriere della Sera, declared: “I can’t say much, there is the confidentiality of the investigation. But I can say what concerns me: I pray for those who are there and for those who are no longer there”. To the correspondent’s question, the lady replies that she doesn’t “fully” know what her son thought of her. “The responsibilities must be clarified, it takes time. I know I have to wait.” And among a few other words she adds: “I have my job which gives me confidence in justice and my faith, I don’t want to say more.” After the stabbing, the newspaper writes, the two suspects – the other is the son of a Carabinieri marshal – attempted to intimidate their friends so that they would not reveal what had happened, “but one of them alerted the police”.

The story

Thomas Christopher Luciani had fled a few days earlier from a community in Isernia where he was found for petty crimes. On Sunday, in the Baden Powell park, he met the two 16-year-olds under investigation who, after luring him into an unsupervised area, allegedly hit him with a knife, presumably as a diver, given the injuries sustained by the boy. The two, it emerged from the first reconstructions, continued to hit him even when he was already lifeless on the ground and then hid his body in the undergrowth. After leaving the park, the boys joined other friends to go to the seaside, to a bathing establishment in the centre, to swim. In the water, according to the testimonies collected, they abandoned the knife. After a few hours one of them, who remained outside the park but was aware of what had happened, raised the alarm. At that point, shortly after 9pm, the boy’s body was found. The Pescara Mobile investigators cross-referenced the testimonies with the images collected by the cameras present in front of the park and the bathing establishment and within a few hours they reach the alleged murderers: they are in custody in a first reception center and within three days there will be the validation hearing.

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Mantovano: “Events like this are systematically repeated”

“We were shocked by the latest news story, which re-emerges how serious the drug issue is today, which concerns the death of 16-year-old Thomas in Pescara – commented the undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council, Alfredo Mantovano, at the conference on the annual report to Parliament on the phenomenon of drug addiction in Italy – It is not a story of degradation because the families of the alleged murderers are families that with usual language we would define as good and now they are in desperation like Thomas’s families a choice and it is systematically repeated because for years if not decades in which road accidents with an inexplicable cause and murders which occur due to the total absence of inhibitory brakes have had the only common thread which is drug taking”.