Santa Maria Capua Vetere – A gunman's revenge for a broken teenage girl's heart. Violent and horrifying behavior toward another boy who had trusted him in a revealing encounter with the adult.
But instead, the knife, the threats, and the fear had appeared, and then the desperate escape between cars, risking being hit. The protagonists were a 37-year-old from Naples, guilty of turning a teenage drama into an armed nightmare, and a 16-year-old boy who had "dared" to call it quits with the girl, the daughter of the man's partner.
The honorary judge of the Court of Santa Maria Capua Vetere sentenced the man to 9 months and 15 days in prison for "private violence and illegal possession of a knife," the sentence reads, but behind the words lies a story of absurd psychological violence.
It was a summer afternoon in 2024, one of those sticky afternoons in the Naples area where the air vibrates with scooters and regrets. The minor, a skinny boy with his school backpack still on his back, climbs into the man's car—the boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend's mother—believing he's being told, "Let's talk about this like men."
Instead, the conversation quickly derailed: "You made my little girl cry, now you pay," the defendant reportedly yelled at him, according to the prosecution's reconstruction based on the testimony of the minor and a passing motorist.
A black-handled kitchen knife, pointed at his throat like an exclamation point of blind rage. The boy, his heart pounding like a drum, doesn't hesitate: he grabs the handbrake, pulls it with brutal force, throws open the door, and speeds off down the wrong lane, weaving between the blaring cars.
"He was driving as if the devil were after him," the driver who picked him up and drove him home told the court. He was a father who described the scene in a trembling voice: "That poor guy was as white as a sheet, stammering about a knife and a girl."
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The man, defended by lawyer Domenico Paolella, denied any intent to harm him: "I just wanted to scare him, to make him understand the weight of the pain," he argued in a quick hearing before an honorary judge, a fast-track procedure that avoided the uproar of a regular trial.
But the evidence leaves no room for doubt: the seized knife, the psychological injuries certified by an expert report from the Caserta Local Health Authority (ASL)—nightmares, chronic anxiety for the minor—and the civil plaintiff, represented by the boy assisted by the lawyer Gennaro Demetrio Paipais, who hammered home the aggravating circumstance of the victim's minority.
"It wasn't a fight between adults, it was an adult terrorizing a child over a failed flirt," Paipais thundered in his closing speech, asking for the maximum sentence and compensation that the judge has already quantified as provisional: over 3.000 euros, to which will be added civil damages to be awarded in a separate proceeding.
The sentence, suspended pending an appeal—the man was free on bond—is a slap in the face to the phenomenon of "surrogate violence," that underworld of family retaliation that in the Naples and Caserta areas reaps dozens of complaints each year.
Here, where the clans teach that knives settle scores, crimes involving knives against minors skyrocketed by 18% in 2025, according to reports from the Santa Maria Capua Vetere Prosecutor's Office: from romantic disputes to backyard feuds, often with improvised "guardians" like this 37-year-old, a precarious worker with a history of marital disputes.
For the minor, now 17, the sentence is a first step toward closure. The defendant's lawyer announced he will appeal: "We will assess the extent of negligence; there was no intent to injure." Meanwhile, the judge ordered the confiscation of the knife—a common object that has become a symbol of madness—and a rehabilitation course for the man.
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8 September 2025 - 18:49
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30 September 2025 - 09:46
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12 November 2025 - 21:05
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