Thirty years and not the life sentence requested by the Prosecutor's Office in a case of double femicide, also due to "the human comprehensibility of the reasons that pushed the perpetrator to commit the crime" .
The Modena Court of Assizes wrote this in explaining why it considers mitigating circumstances equivalent to aggravating circumstances for Salvatore Montefusco, accused of killing his wife and her daughter on June 13, 2022 : "Having reached the age of 70 with a clean criminal record, he would never have committed crimes of such seriousness if not driven by the nefarious family dynamics that had been triggered over time," the sentence reads.
Montefusco shot dead his wife Gabriela Trandafir, 47, and the woman's daughter, Renata, 22 , in Cavazzona di Castelfranco Emilia.
The prosecution had requested life imprisonment, but the judges recognized the mitigating circumstances equivalent to the aggravating ones recognized (marital relationship and having committed the crime in front of the couple's minor child), excluding premeditation, abject and futile motives, having acted with cruelty and considering the mistreatment to be absorbed in the murder.
The sentence explains in over 200 pages how the crime occurred in a context of strong conflict between Montefusco and the two women, with mutual complaints . According to the judges, the motive "cannot be traced back and reduced to a mere economic content" on the house where they lived.
But it should rather refer to «the psychological condition of profound discomfort, humiliation and enormous frustration experienced by the defendant, due to the climate of extremely high conflict that had been created within the marital household and the concrete possibility that he himself would have to abandon the family home » and with it also the control and care of the child.
For the judges it is "plausible" that, as reported by Montefusco, when Renata told him once again that he would have to leave the house this a few meters away and kill the two who "never ever" according to what was stated by the witnesses heard in court, he had previously threatened to kill.
