Sassari, stabbed in the back by her uncle: "He kept saying 'I have to do it'"

Moments in which you risk being killed and that are remembered with pain months later. Roberta Mazzone, 49, was stabbed on May 21 in her home on via Cabu d'Ispiga in Sassari in the Monte Rosello neighborhood . The one who stabbed her was her husband's uncle, Domenico Ottomano, 55, from Bari, who had been living with the couple for a few months, and who, this morning in court in Sassari, read some spontaneous statements, in the abbreviated session and in front of the preliminary hearing judge Sergio De Luca on what happened. He apologized but also painted a scenario in which he would have been subjected to several requests for money for his stay in the home.

Version rejected by Roberta who also retraced, after the hearing, the sequence of terror that occurred that day at lunchtime. "I had just returned home and he told me that a package had arrived. When I entered the room he stabbed me twice in the back." She is wearing a large jacket and two sweaters and this, according to her, saved her. She receives the blows that pierce her at kidney level: "When I asked him why he replied: 'I have to do it'." Then he hits her with a punch and breaks the knife in her head. "A knife of his property that I bought some time before at the nearby supermarket." Mazzone loses a lot of blood and the man, she reports, runs away by locking himself in a room and breaking a statuette. "I went to the neighbor asking for help and telling her to lock us in because she would kill us. Then after a while I lost consciousness."

And she is taken by the medical staff, taken to Santissima Annunziata where she remains between life and death for a few days: "I was delirious, I called my mother, who had been dead for some time, and I asked for my husband Michele". In the meantime Ottomano telephones the State police claiming that the woman had fallen on the blade. But what Roberta and her husband Michele suppose is that the attack was planned, by stealing the keys to their part of the house, which he did not have, entering after breaking the bathroom window. And the tension between the three was evident today in court so much so that the prison police had to intervene.

"He disgusts me," says Michele, who then recalls: "I was desperate when I saw Roberta in those conditions." After an initial period in a wheelchair, she now walks with the aid of a stick and with great difficulty, a consequence of the damage inflicted on her kidneys by the stab wounds. "I want to thank," says Roberta Mazzone, "the doctors who allowed me to stay alive." Unfortunately, she will no longer be able to work as a carer. "It was all his fault. I still think about the 400 euros I had earned in those days and that he stole." The hearing of the abbreviated trial will be held on June 25: the incumbent prosecutor is Elisa Succu, the lawyer Elisabetta Udassi represents the civil party, while the defense lawyer is Andrea Piroddi.