The Court of Assizes of Appeal of Rome, accepting a request made by the defenders, ordered the house arrest of Gabriele Natale Hjorth, the young American convicted for the death of vice-brigadier Mario Cerciello Rega .
The judges established that the detention should take place, as requested, in the home of the boy's grandmother in Fregene , on the Roman coast.
On appeal on July 3 , Hjorth's sentence was reduced from 22 years to 11 years and 4 months. The other person responsible for the crime, Finnegan Lee Elder, also saw his sentence reduced from 24 to 15 years . It was the Supreme Court that ordered a new appeal process to recalculate the sentences. Immediately after the sentence, Hjorth's lawyers had requested house arrest, which was granted today.
«There is a lot of shock», declares Rosamaria, Mario Cerciello Rega's wife, « totally shocked by the news she learned », says her lawyer Massimo Ferrandino. «As usual, she does not intend to comment, but she is pervaded by a profound sense of mistrust», she continues. «We still don't know the reasons that the court took to drastically reduce the sentences of the two Americans and already one of the two is sent under house arrest in the splendid setting of Fregene. Mario Cerciello Rega, a very valiant state servant, died under the blows of eleven stab wounds, but evidently it was not understood that the stab wounds did not end on 26 July five years ago... One rather wants to think that there is justice in reverse ».
Cerciello Rega, who was 35 years old, was killed on the night between 25 and 26 July 2019. Elder and Hjorth, Californian tourists aged 18 and 19, tried to buy drugs in Trastevere by turning to an intermediary, Sergio Brugiatelli, who took them to a man who sold them a tachypirin tablet. The boys then stole Brugiatelli's backpack and proposed an exchange to get back the money they had already handed over. However, after the report of the theft of the backpack, Cerciello Rega showed up at that meeting with a colleague, both unarmed and in plain clothes. A clash broke out and the policeman was stabbed to death
