“Always available, a good-natured man,” “a man at the service of others,” “a very good rescuer,” “sweet, altruistic, great human values.”
This is how everyone remembers Marco Pusceddu, 51, killed Thursday evening, shortly before midnight, at the Intervol headquarters in Buddusò, where he worked as a 118 emergency responder. In Domusnovas, the town where he grew up, and in Portoscuso, the town where he lived. Friends and colleagues in the volunteer world remember him as a good person.
Yet someone hated him, so much so that they killed him with five gunshots to the chest and face.
The murder
The killer set out on foot, walking down Via Pietro Nenni, around a dry stone wall, and reaching the two-story building housing Intervol. He rang the intercom at the volunteer association's entrance and, once one of the 51-year-old's two colleagues opened the door, asked for his target. "I'm looking for Marco Pusceddu," he said loudly, his face uncovered. Pusceddu approached and was gunned down in what Buddusò mayor Massimo Satta calls a "mafia-style execution."
The Carabinieri of the Ozieri operations unit and the Sassari provincial command are leading the hunt for the killer. There are no cameras at the Intervol headquarters, but the killer may have been captured by other surveillance cameras.
The motive is thought to be personal revenge, given the manner of execution and some incidents in the victim's past.
The mysterious attack
Who attacked him with a car jack on April 28th in a lay-by after the Flumentepido gas station? Who was the man discovered at the Intervol headquarters in Berchidda, where Pusceddu also worked, and who then disappeared? Is it the same man who killed him?
"Marco was attacked while helping a friend in a rest area after the Flumentepido gas station," says Roberto Pusceddu, Marco's brother. "He was in desperate condition, transported to Sirai and then transferred to Brotzu, where he was hospitalized for two months." The attack was never reported, and Pusceddu himself couldn't explain it.
From February until the day of the attack, the 51-year-old worked as a driver in Berchidda. After his recovery, the competent doctor deemed him unfit to drive, and he was therefore sent to Buddusò as a first responder.
And right in Berchidda, a few months ago, another mysterious incident occurred that may have something to do with this bloodbath. A man was discovered inside the courtyard of the Intervol headquarters where Pusceddu worked. And when volunteers located him, he disappeared. Was he looking for Pusceddu?
All the details in the articles by Emanuele Floris and Andrea Artizzu in L'Unione Sarda, now available at newsstands.
abbonati.unionesarda.it/Edicola