Found dead on the beach: "Alessandro was killed, I don't want to give up"

PIOMBINO. Not resigned. Because he is the father, of course. But above all because he is really convinced that that child did not die from a fall. He is sure: they killed him. "They beat him to death and I'm not the only one to say it," he repeats Renzo Benucci.

At dawn on 25 October 2017 his second son Alessandro Benucci it was found lifeless on the beach below Piazza Bovio. He was 36 and had a difficult life behind him. Renzo knows it. He has always known and does not hide it. The drug was Ale's problem. But it wasn't the one who killed him. Not directly. Not according to him, but not even according to the lawyer Franco Balestrieri and doctor Giuseppe Alessandrini, family consultant. Their battle has been going on for two years, a seemingly impossible mission. Once before, the prosecutor had asked for the court to be dismissed, once the judge Marco Sacquegna had granted it. The family had objected, the lawyer Balestrieri had managed to wrest another six months of investigations. Now we are running out of the extension, then there will be the final decision of the investigating judge.

FINDING. Let's try to reconnect the threads of this story. On the morning of October 25, a Wednesday, the young man is found dead on the beach, twenty yards below the benches of Piazza Bovio. One immediately thinks of a suicide or a fall due to an illness. Alessandro was a drug addict. He was no longer that brilliant young man at school, good at football, respected at work and among friends. He was "just a drug addict", one that not even San Patrignano had managed to heal. One who used cocaine, heroin, drugs. What could he do at night like this in Piazza Bovio?

THE FIRST INVESTIGATIONS. And so the investigations immediately take a direction, supported by a first external examination and subsequently by a medical expert's report of doctor Damiano Marra, according to which "the entire damaging complex found on the corpse has features fully compatible with a precipitation dynamic along the steep rock face at the foot of which the body was found".

Marra writes that one cannot exclude "different mechanisms at the origin of precipitation, which cannot be better determined from the medical-legal point of view". But he also adds that the injuries are incompatible with an assault by third parties. No other investigations are carried out: including those on the nails of the corpse. Not even X-rays.

WHAT IS NOT SOLD. It seems a case already closed at the start. But something is not right. The wounds on the boy's body are also compatible with a beating. Not so much for the broken left wrist, but for those swellings on the arms and on one side, coupled signs like those left by a knuckle-duster; for those wounds to the kidneys and ribs; for the blood under the nails but not on the palms of the hands; for the absence of grazes on the face; for that important wound in the neck, also here with three perpendicular signs. Not only. Also due to the position of the body, not aligned with the point of the presumed fall. And for clothes: clean, intact. And for those algae, so many algae, found inside the shoes (unfastened, but still at the feet), under and around the socks. As if the boy had been dragged to that beach. Live or dead. And finally because there was not even a drop of blood around the body, on the rocks next to it, on the clothes. In the sweatshirt, there was only one long blond hair.

MURDER HYPOTHESIS. At the request of the lawyer Balestrieri, the deputy prosecutor Giuseppe Rizzo convinces: it is appropriate to investigate further. On the file he writes the word "murder", asks the police to investigate again, to hear the boy's parents and Dr. Alessandrini. And to understand with whom the victim had spent the last hours of life.

THAT NIGHT. Other elements emerge. Alessandro that evening (Tuesday 24th) leaves his wife at home, pregnant, and he sees himself with a friend, let's call him Alfa (the names are all on the record). He goes with him from the kebabbaro of Via Pisacane, at one in the morning he is seen by another witness (Beta) and later he and Alfa are crossed in Piazza Dante by two other witnesses: Gamma and his girlfriend Omega. They talk, they say that Benucci has to meet with some people. He comes back from home, talks to his wife, takes a sweatshirt to lend to Alfa and takes the latter home with him. He answers the phone, then he sees himself with Delta, the last witness. Stay with him during Italy until 2.45. Then he greets him and says he has to go, he has that appointment. All things that Delta (now in prison for other reasons) reports to the police.

THE DEATH. Death dates back to between 3 and 3.30 that night. About an hour before, the wife hears a knock on the door: she gets scared, she doesn't open. Benucci's body will be discovered at 7.30 by a man walking with his dog in Piazza Bovio. Are the people Benucci met with the ones who killed him? Maybe after convincing him or forced him to go down to the beach to get off the road?

CAMERAS. The one in Piazza Bovio is useless, pointing towards the lighthouse. There would be another, installed at the Teatro del Mare restaurant, aimed at the steps and, in part, on the wall where the boy would have fallen. But it does not appear to have been examined.

MOTIVE. In the days before, Ale found himself with a fair amount in his pocket, more than a thousand euros. There was a rumor that he had passed off on his own, beyond the control of those who run the drug rounds in the city. Apparently they were clean money, checks received by the wife. In any case, someone knew about that money.

LAWYER. Balestrieri remains optimistic: "The judge – says the lawyer – basically accepted the opposition to the filing with the information provided by us. I therefore trust in the work of the investigators ». –