Denise Cosco, daughter of the repentant Lea Garofalo, takes her own life at 17 after years of trauma

A window as an escape route. From a life of pain, betrayal, fear. A leap, to leave everything behind. After four days of agony, Denise Cosco, the daughter of the repentant Lea Garofalo, who was kidnapped, killed and burned by her ex-partner Carlo Cosco, died in a hospital.

It was November 24th, shortly thereafter Denise would have turned 18, her father had organized a party for her that she never attended. A few hours earlier, together with the girl's first boyfriend, Carmine Venturino, Cosco killed her mother and ravaged her body. Lea Garofalo was 35 years old, exactly the same as Denise four days ago, when she decided to take her own life.

It is not known where it happened. You can't know. It is not even known whose name will be on the obituaries. To be free, Denise had to give up that too, her history, her identity. Out of the protection program since 2018, the girl had tried, amidst a thousand stumbles, to rebuild her life, her story. Libera had tried to stay close to her, to support her along the way. At least, until she allowed it.

Denise wanted to move forward, say those who knew her, to choose her own path. It ended up being tortuous between slips and attempts to get back up, discomfort, the effort - recent - to come to terms and make peace with a cumbersome past, meeting the father.

In the present, there was a partner, met in the dark periods in which she had deliberately lost herself, and a four-year-old son, concrete proof, for some, of the attempt to go beyond. It wasn't enough.

“I am a proud witness of justice because it is not easy to become a civil party against your father, but it is a choice of internal freedom to start over with life,” she said in the courtroom before testifying against Carlo Casco at the trial for the murder of her mother. The same procedure in which she had to recognize the woman from the few jewels that remained intact after Lea Garofalo's body was burned and destroyed. "On the day of the sentence - the girl said a few years ago, in one of the very quick interviews she had - I didn't rejoice. They ruined my life but I can't hate anyone. Not even my father. Every now and then I feel sorry for him. He didn't understand what he missed: a family, a daughter, the love he could have had".