Professor stabbed to death, a school worker arrested

The Naples North Public Prosecutor's Office, coordinated by the prosecutor Maria Antonietta Troncone, arrested a school employee in the investigation into the murder of Marcello Toscano , the 64-year-old support teacher found lifeless, stabbed to death , in the courtyard of the "Marino Guarano" school of Melito, in the Neapolitan area.

The man - long listened to by the investigators - is charged with the crime of murder .

Regarding the circumstances of the professor's death, if the time he stopped answering his cell phone were to match that of the attack, he would have been killed between 12 and 12.30 , that is, while students and teachers were teaching . A shocking hypothesis, but which seems likely.

On the victim's body, discovered in a bush, behind a hut, the carabinieri found the signs of several stab wounds and blood traces , perhaps even of the murderer. Other traces have been found in the hut.

"I am disconcerted, I cling to the pain of the family and the school community. We ask that light be shed as soon as possible", the comment of the Minister of Education Patrizio Bianchi .

THE INVESTIGATIONS - Di Toscano has not received any news since the middle of Tuesday morning and when, in the evening, he did not return home, the victim's son showed up at the carabinieri barracks in nearby Mugnano at 19.25: after the complaint the search for disappearance started and between 9 pm and 9.30 pm the daughter found her father's car near the school. Guindi the opening of the gates, the inspection of the military and the discovery of the body in the flowerbed.

All day witnesses were heard in the barracks, looking for useful information and attention was focused on one in particular.

The video surveillance of the school would only partially cover the area of the discovery , but it is not excluded that the cameras of some shops may have recorded images useful for the investigation.

THE MEMORY OF COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS - To describe the victim's figure to journalists is his friend Andrea Cipolletti, also a teacher: "I remember his choice to be a support teacher, to stay close to the problems of children with passion and professionalism ".

Toscano was a municipal councilor in Mugnano, but in the last administrative offices he was the first of the non-elected members of the Democratic Party. At least at the moment, it is excluded that his death could be attributable to political activity.

Yesterday the rumor was circulating that the attack could be traced back to a demerit note put to a pupil, a thesis rejected by Cipolletti: "Marcello worried about the father of a pupil who was creating problems for him? I deny it, he was very serene, jovial, lately I crossed paths with him and I had no reason to think of anything unusual. "

In the middle of the night his cousin, the journalist Marcello Curzio , entrusted his outburst to social media: "They killed him like a dog in the courtyard of a school in the Italian Republic in the late morning of an anonymous Tuesday at the end of September ... Chronicles from Melito where people die without a reason and between general indifference. Thanks to a state that has long since abdicated ".

(Unioneonline / vl)