“If he made a mistake he will have to pay.” Simone, 18, is the brother of one of the two sixteen-year-olds investigated for the murder of Thomas Christopher Luciani, 16, in Pescara. “We apologize to the family and we will be close to them. They absolutely did not deserve this,” he explains to Tg1. «I cried a lot for Thomas. I mean it I and my family are sorry for him first of all, because he is no longer here». As for the brother, «pay justly for what he did. He needs to spend his years in institutions where he can be helped. We don’t ask for discountswe believe in justice.” In the family, he explains, no one could even imagine that his brother was involved in drug dealing: “Absolutely not, it’s something we can’t understand.”
Thomas Christopher Luciani was killed with 25 stabs inflicted with a diving knife. The two murderers, according to the Abruzzo newspaper The center, they would have spat on the dying victim on the ground and even put out a cigarette on his face. Then, once at the seaside for a swim, they would not have spared themselves macabre jokes about how they had reduced their peer. The task of carrying out the autopsy will be given to the coroner today.
The key witness
A witness, a friend of the alleged murderers, reconstructed the whole story during the interrogation. He said he met with friends at the Pescara station around 4.30pm on Sunday afternoon. “L’the intent was to go to the seaside but also to talk to Christopher Thomas who owed 200/300 euros to (…). Cristopher is usually near the station and we met him there”, it is written in the minutes. “(…) and Cristopher started arguing because (…) he was aggressive and Cristopher in return answered him that he also had friends to call. We first moved towards the silos of the station, where (…) he got annoyed because Christopher did not give him back the money, then (…) forced Christopher to head towards the small park in via Raffaello Sanzio in a secluded area».
In the backpack the knife, a gun and a change of clothes
«While (…) he was walking, already inside the park, he showed us that he was holding a knife». Not only that, one of the two assassins would have a gun small in size (which he would show to friends, but which he did not use). The knife shown to friends already at the station and a change of clothes stuffed in the backpack could constitute premeditation.
«Thomas he made almost death noises 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”, adds the witness. “While they were doing it, it seemed like they were no longer thinking about it.” The stab wounds were inflicted on both killers: fifteen by one, ten by the other. One of the two apparently got rid of the knife, “which he had wrapped in a blood-stained sock, leaving it behind the rocks”, once on the beach.
The witness also assured that he had not smoked drugs. «While we were together they did not use drugs. They smoked weed afterwards, but not me.”
The witness’ father, a lieutenant of the Carabinieri
The boy in the group who reported the crime is the son of a lieutenant colonel of the Carabinieri: it was he, in whom the young man confided, who raised the alarm and had the body found. «I thought my son was hanging out with good guys. He told me, “I’m going out with the son of a colleague of yours, the son of a lawyer,” and I was fine.. Unfortunately this was not the case. Now I want my son to live with respect for the victim of this atrocious crime.”
The grandmother who acted as his mother
Thomas Christopher Luciani grew up with grandmother, Olga Cipriano66 years old, former jeweler who lives in a beautiful villa in Rosciano, half an hour’s drive from Pescara. «He hadn’t even turned 17 yet, but he looked much younger because he was small and fragile. For me he was like a son, because I raised him since he was 3 and a half years old”, the woman told The print. «That is, since his mother, my Colombian adopted daughter, abandoned him. She never knew her father.”
And again: «Up until middle school everything went smoothly here in Rosciano. Then when he started high school, at the vocational school in Pescara, the troubles began. But he wasn’t a drug addict and he wasn’t a drug addict. He was a golden boy. He had the crickets that all kids this age have. Bad company ruined him.”
