Vintage Mini on fire, father and 6-year-old daughter from Avellino killed

It should have been a family Sunday. Mom, dad, and their two young daughters were headed to the Pinerolo area for a small vintage car rally. A shared outing turned tragic. This morning, shortly before 9:00 a.m., Giuseppe Pennacchio, 42, died with his 6-year-old daughter Nicole in an accident on the Turin-Pinerolo highway. The man and the little girl were trapped in the car, a Mini Cooper that caught fire after a rear-end collision with a Toyota Verso driven by a 55-year-old man, now hospitalized in Pinerolo. The Toyota was also engulfed in flames. The blaze unfolded before the helpless eyes of the wife and mother of the two victims. The woman was traveling in another Mini Cooper with her youngest daughter, just 4 months old. She tried to get closer, trying to save her husband and child. But the fire prevented her from doing so, and the woman had no choice but to call for help. The victim had reached kilometer 17, almost at the Riva di Pinerolo exit, when, presumably to check his car, he stopped in the emergency lane. He got out, then got back in and drove off. As he was merging onto the main road, he was rear-ended by the Toyota. Initial investigations suggest the gas tank exploded. And the Mini Cooper in which Gianluca and Nicole were traveling—their father's great passion—proved to be a death trap. The exact circumstances of the incident and any possible culprits are now being investigated by the highway police, who closed the highway near Riva di Pinerolo today to conduct investigations and allow emergency vehicles to pass. "My heart sinks; I can't believe it. I entrust them to God," says an elderly neighbor of the family who, since learning the news, has continued to pray. "They had been here in Orbassano for three years," he explains. "He was originally from Avellino. I used to meet them often, with those smiling girls." Today they were supposed to attend a gathering at the castle in Macello, a town of about 1.600 inhabitants in the Pinerolo area. A small, little-publicized initiative, one of those designed for a family Sunday. Just like their father, Gianluca, wanted to do.