His name is Stefano Argentino and he is a 27-year-old from Noto (Siracusa) the man who, according to the accusations, killed Sara Campanella on the street yesterday afternoon in Messina. The man is a university colleague of the victim, a trainee nurse at the Policlinico, a hospital near which she was murdered with a stab to the throat.
The 27-year-old was tracked down with the support of the Carabinieri of the Provincial Command of Syracuse: he was in his home in Noto, he didn't say a word and allowed himself to be handcuffed.
Surveillance camera footage framed him. According to the reconstruction, Campanella left the hospital yesterday afternoon at the end of her daily internship, she walked along Viale Gazzi to reach the bus stop. The killer followed her in a car, then stopped and got out. Once he reached her, after an argument, he stabbed her on the sidewalk near a gas station and then quickly walked away. Sara Campanella took a few steps, then collapsed on the ground near a flowerbed in a pool of blood.
Several witnesses witnessed the attack: Sara repeatedly shouted "Enough, leave me," they say. One of them tried to follow the killer while the 22-year-old was being rescued and loaded into a 118 ambulance that took her to the Policlinico hospital. But by then it was too late, she had lost too much blood. A massive manhunt broke out in the streets of Messina, which ended after 12 hours with an arrest.
Two years of harassment
Sara Campanella, originally from Misilmeri, was attending the third year of the Faculty of Biomedical Laboratory Techniques at the University of Messina, therefore she was an intern in the very hospital where she was taken at the end of her life.
" There had been attentions from this young man, even insistently - the prosecutor explained in a press conference - These attentions, which had been going on for a couple of years, bothered her" . They were "morbid", her classmates confirmed. Sara had never reported him, perhaps believing she could keep the situation under control, but she had always rejected him.
She had repeatedly expressed a certain fear to her friends: "On a regular basis - we read in the arrest warrant for the suspect - he bothered the victim, proposing himself, asking her to go out and deepen their relationship, not even stopping in the face of the girl's refusal ". The student had forwarded some of her messages to her friends "in which - the magistrates write - the suspect gave evidence of an authentic harassing strategy ". Once a friend had even intervened to push Argentino away, who was complaining that Sara "didn't smile at him like in the past". On the day of the crime, after class, the 27-year-old student had asked where Sara was, who had fallen behind, and had gone to look for her. One of her colleagues had shortly after received a voice message from the victim: "Where are you, I'm with the sick person who is looking after me?".
(Online Union)