Doctors without guilt: for the investigating judge of Tempio, Alessandro Cossu, the doctors of the Emergency Room of Olbia, Lucia Ventroni and Ilenia Pepe, have no responsibility in the death of the lawyer from Sassari Cicino Manca.
The judge rejected an appeal by the victim's family and ordered the case to be shelved. After a legal battle that lasted several years, the investigating judge also reached the same conclusions as the prosecutor Mauro Lavra and the Attorney General's Office (which had removed the case from the Tempio Prosecutor's Office, reopening the case).
The facts date back to August 22, 2020, when Manca was taken to the Olbia Emergency Room from Portobello di Gallura and died in hospital due to an aortic dissection .
In essence, the pathology was not diagnosed promptly and this was one of the causes of death. But the documents state that the doctors were unarmed, due to the "shortage of human and material resources actually available in relation to the number of cases to be treated" .
In the midst of a pandemic emergency and in an Emergency Room with 23 yellow codes and 4 contextual red codes, the specialists were not put in the conditions to operate effectively . Furthermore, the investigating judge describes a disastrous situation with the absence of an Eco-Fast ultrasound scanner in the Emergency Room and the sharing of a single ultrasound scanner between the Emergency Room and the Intensive Care Unit.
Lucia Ventroni and Ilenia Pepe (defended by Rita Dedola, Gerolamo Orecchioni and Giuseppe Bardini) were therefore not in a material condition to operate correctly with a diagnosis of aortic dissection.
The relatives of the Sassari lawyer Cicino Manca (represented by the lawyers Sebastiano Tola and Nicola Satta ) have never considered the question of the operational context conditioned by emergency factors and the scarcity of resources to be well-founded .