Rocca D'Evandro, the pirate who ran over and killed Umberto Pariselli sentenced to 2 years, 2 months and 20 days

Rocca D'Evandro, the pirate who ran over and killed Umberto Pariselli sentenced to 2 years, 2 months and 20 days

No punishment would ever have been adequate to repay their loss and the reprehensible way in which it occurred, but the family of Umberto Pariselli have at least obtained some justice. At the conclusion of the preliminary hearing held on Wednesday 29 June 2022 in the Court of Cassino (Fr), and after retiring to the council chamber, Judge Dr. Alessandra Cassinelli sentenced to two years, two months and twenty days the hit-and-run driver who hit the innocent elderly man while he was riding his bicycle on the side of the road, driving a car that was found to be uninsured, and who also fled, abandoning the victim to his fate: he is Eugenio Del Primo, sixty years old, from Rocca d'Evandro, in the Caserta area.

The GIP has almost entirely accepted the requests of the Public Prosecutor of the Cassino Prosecutor's Office in charge of the criminal proceedings, Dr. Marina Marra, who had asked for three years; a sentence that could have been even heavier if the defendant had not benefited from the reduction of one third provided for by virtue of the choice of the abbreviated procedure, and that in any case, being more than two years, cannot be suspended: Del Primo will have to serve it in full, even if in all likelihood, through his lawyer, he will ask to be entrusted to social services.

And he won't be able to drive a car again any time soon, as he has also been given the additional penalty of having his license revoked, and in cases of escape and failure to provide assistance the law states that it cannot be re-obtained before 10-12 years: "the life sentence of the license" as the law has been defined.

The latest serious episode of road piracy occurred on August 25, 2020, shortly before 19:430 p.m., on the State Road 81 “Valle del Liri”, in the Cassino hamlet of San Cesareo. Pariselli, 430 years old, from Cassino, was returning home on his bike and was proceeding on via valle del Garigliano (section of the SS7) in the direction of San Vittore-Rocca d'Evandro; as has been ascertained, he was pedaling completely to the right astride the line that delimits the carriageway, he could not go further: along that stretch of road on one side there is the ditch, on the other the fences of the houses. But despite this impeccable conduct, and despite the fact that it was still light out, at 6 o'clock on a summer evening, the defendant, who was travelling in the same direction at the wheel of his Fiat Punto, unexpectedly hit him at number XNUMX, throwing him onto the bonnet and hurling him onto the asphalt: the driver and the passenger of a car that was coming (after) in the same direction reported seeing a figure "fly".

There was nothing that could be done for the pensioner, who violently hit his head against the car (breaking the windshield) and then on the ground: upon their arrival, the 118 paramedics, after futile attempts at resuscitation, had to declare him dead.

The driver initially stopped and got out of the car, but got back in less than 20 seconds later, as shown by footage from a private camera in a nearby house acquired by investigators. He then took off again and disappeared.

The Cassino Carabinieri, who immediately arrived, and whom Pariselli's family, as well as Studio3A who assists them, always want to thank for their efforts, immediately set out on the trail of the hit-and-run driver, also helped by the fact that, among those, residents and passing motorists, who had instead stopped to help the victim by alerting 118, some had seen him and even recognized him, living only three kilometers away. The military reached him at home in record time, promptly finding his car heavily damaged, and which he had also hidden and concealed in the back of the house, covering the license plate and the rear with a roller shutter.

At that point Del Primo had no choice but to admit his guilt, claiming that he had not seen the cyclist and justifying his serious conduct which culminated in his escape and failure to provide assistance by the fear he felt "having seen blood and heard screams" and then, a thesis which he also supported in vain at the trial, by the fact that other people had also stopped.

The "pirate", despite the overwhelming evidence against him, a fact that did not fail to arouse further bitterness in the relatives of the elderly man, through his lawyer tried in every way to lighten his position, for example by conditioning the request for the abbreviated trial on the conferment of a kinematic expert report to reconstruct the dynamics of the accident, which was instead considered more than clear by the judge, who rejected this as well as his other requests.

If that wasn't enough, the carabinieri discovered that the Punto was uninsured and not because I forgot: Del Primo knew it well, but, he explained, "I needed it to go to work". A further violation that complicated the compensation process: Pariselli's family, who were compensated, entrusted the criminal part to the lawyer Vincenzo Cortellessa of the Santa Maria Capua Vetere court and, through the head of the Rome office, Angelo Novelli, to Studio3A-Valore SpA, a company specialized at a national level in compensation for damages and the protection of citizens' rights, which had to deal with the Guarantee Fund for road victims that is responsible for damages caused by uninsured or unidentified vehicles but whose procedures are notoriously slower and more cumbersome.

The now sixty-year-old, by virtue of the extreme gravity of the crimes committed, was initially arrested and subjected to the restrictive measure of house arrest (later changed to the obligation to sign) and, at the end of the preliminary investigations, Dr. Marra requested and obtained his referral to trial for the crime of road homicide aggravated by the fact of not having stopped to provide assistance and fleeing. This led to the hearing on Wednesday and the sentence which is not insignificant for Italian "practice" and which partly provides an answer to the wife and children of Mr. Umberto.

Who have always asked not for revenge, but for a punishment appropriate to the terrible act committed against their relative, who had the only fault of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who did not deserve that tragic fate and of being abandoned in agony on the side of a road by his attacker. With the hope that the sentence can also be a warning to avoid the repetition of other tragedies of this kind.