Murder in Saonara: son-in-law suffocates his 97-year-old mother-in-law after a request for medical help

He would have suffocated his elderly mother-in-law who lived with him with a bag over her head after she had expressed health needs. This is what emerges from the first reconstructions of the murder that occurred in the Padua area, in Villatora in the municipality of Saonara. The victim's son-in-law, a seventy-year-old man, would have killed the woman who lived with him and her daughter: the crime would have occurred while the man was at home alone with his mother-in-law.

The 97-year-old woman had various pathologies, which is why her daughter looked after her at home together with her husband. According to initial information, the man suffocated her after she expressed medical needs.

The motivations of the son-in-law

It was the woman's own son-in-law who called 112 after suffocating her. The seventy-year-old, with no criminal record and pensioner, asked for the patrol's intervention, explaining that he had attacked his mother-in-law, causing her death. While the man was held on the phone, the police went to the scene. From what emerges, the man declared to the military that he acted following the repeated irrational behavior of his mother-in-law, aggravated by the progressive worsening of the latter's health conditions and by a condition of profound emotional distress. Specifically, the man said he was tired of hearing her complain about him. On site, the prosecutor on duty Marco Brusegan and the medical examiner Antonello Cirnelli, the prosecutor's expert in charge of carrying out the first external inspection and, subsequently, the autopsy. The man was arrested and taken to prison in Padua.