• Insane kills two brothers and an elderly man, then commits suicide

  • Ardea, two children and a man shot dead.

    Murderer barricades himself at home, GIS raids

  • Shooting in the street in Ardea, killed an old man and two brothers

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June 14, 2021 Bloody Sunday in Ardea, a town of 50,000 people near the coast south of Rome.



At 11 in the morning, for reasons still to be clarified, a 35-year-old exploded gunshots in via degli Astri, a residential hamlet of Colle Romito. The toll is dramatic: 4 dead, two siblings, David and Daniel aged 5 and 10, a 74-year-old pensioner who passed on the street by bicycle, and the same perpetrator of the triple crime.



The murderer was 35 years old, his name was Andrea Pignani, he lived with his mother in a villa purchased in 2019, a few tens of meters from the field of the triple murder. A computer engineering graduate, unemployed, a year ago, in May, he underwent Compulsory Medical Treatment (Tso) for assaulting his mother, but it does not appear that he was currently being treated for mental problems. According to the carabinieri he had not left the house for practically a year.



According to what has been reconstructed so far, Pignani came out and on his way met Daniel and David who were playing quietly. He shot him in the neck and chest and, says his grandmother, "they died holding the hand of their father", Domenico Fusinato, under house arrest in another villa in Colle Romito for drug offenses, but immediately rushed as soon as he heard the shots. In the meantime, Pignani had also hit and killed with a bullet in the head Salvatore Ranieri, 74, who was passing by on a bicycle and knew neither his killer nor his brothers. A fourth person, a man who was going to take out the trash, would have escaped death only because he was too far away for the range of the gun.



Pignani then returned home, locked himself inside and for hours he did not respond to the negotiators who arrived on the spot to convince him to surrender. When a commando of the Gis carabinieri entered the house in the middle of the afternoon, the man had already killed himself with the same gun. '' I heard a loud bang, the sound of broken glass, a shot and then after a few seconds a shot from a machine gun, at least 7 shots '' reported a neighbor of Pignani, recounting the start of the blitz. The man was found committed suicide in the bedroom.



The neighbors, other inhabitants of the district, tell of that gun he pulled out to threaten every time there was an argument, something that annoyed him, whether it was the pruning of trees or some noise around his house. But no one had filed a complaint, according to the carabinieri.



According to the president of Colle Romito, Romano Catini, the presence of a gun - which belonged to the 35-year-old's father, a security guard who died a year ago - had been repeatedly reported by frightened neighbors. But the investigators are not reported.



'' He had arrived here a few months ago and immediately created problems for the consortium. Sometimes it had already happened that the man left the house and fired into the air. We had reported the matter, but it was not clear whether he had a real weapon or a scacciacani '', declared Romano Catini, president of the Consortium in via di Colle Romito. "When we heard the explosion - he continued - we thought it was a firecracker thrown by some child. Then we approached the area and we discovered that instead they were gunshots". "The family of the murderer - he later revealed - was known in the neighborhood for episodes of harassment and degradation. Several times they have been reported to the police. Just think that a person of our internal supervision has the task of keeping d 'eye that house ".



A motive is being sought, but there would have been no conflicts between Pignani and the father of the children, the latter who appeared in 2018 in an operation by the carabinieri in Ostia against the splinters of the Triassi clan, considered an opponent of the Spada. It is difficult to think of a merciless revenge. Investigations however continue to ascertain the exact dynamics.



The memory of the victims remains. Of two children. says the grandmother, "polite and respectful. Daniel, the oldest, had only 9 and 10 in the report card". And the 74 / year old Salvatore Ranieri, on vacation with his wife in Colle Romito, where he had a second home. "Salvatore had gone for a bike ride. I was worried because he hadn't come back for lunch, they told me there had been a shooting and I found out like that" said the wife of the elderly gentleman, victim together with the two kids. Someone, said the mayor, says that Ranieri "died to defend the two children". 



The mayor of Ardea, Mario Savarese, tells of a quiet place where in recent decades even well-known political figures came to vacation. Some long-time inhabitants, on the other hand, tell of unsavory characters, some of whom are under house arrest as the father of the children killed. But the real motive for a cold slaughter like this will be hard to find, as the perpetrator later committed suicide.