On January 3, 2021, in full lockdown, the body of a 28-year-old boy was found inside a factory in the province of Varese. Hanged with his belt according to the Busto Arsizio court, Simone Mattarelli took his own life due to taking cocaine, after three hours of pursuit with six Carabinieri gazelles between the provinces of Milan, Como, Varese and Monza. Both judicial investigations opened over the years ended with dismissal, but things did not go that way for the boy’s family.
“I think someone killed him,” says Luca Mattarelli, the victim’s father.
Thanks to unpublished audio and documents, interviews with the protagonists of history and experts including Ilaria Cucchi, Fabio Anselmo, the representatives of Amnesty International and the Antigone Association, the journalist Stefano Vergine reconstructs the last hours lived by Mattarelli, the judicial investigations that followed and the many dark points that emerge in this story. A journalistic investigation to understand whether it is a case similar to that of Stefano Cucchi or Federico Aldrovandi, or of a young man who took his own life.
Divided into six episodes, the podcast also contains some unpublished news –
The videos of the chase, filmed by the bodycam of one of the carabinieri, show that two gunshots were not fired towards the ground, as reported in the reports. Furthermore, one of the employees of the factory where Mattarelli’s body was found, interviewed for the podcast, stated that he was not at work on the morning of January 3, as reported in the judicial papers. There are also doubts about the causes of suicide.
Veniero Gambaroprofessor of toxicological chemistry at the University of Milan, interviewed as an expert unrelated to the case. in fact, it excludes that with the quantity of cocaine found in his body Mattarelli could have been in the down phase, considered by the Court of Busto Arsizio to be the cause of the suicide. “He was definitely not in a down phase,” Gambaro declares in the podcast. According to Mattarelli’s mother, Maria Formisano, “something slipped away that evening.”
For Matteo Mattarelli, brother of the victim, «there are many clues that indicate that Simone’s was not a suicide but a murder: for this reason we ask that the judicial investigations be reopened, and we appeal to those who know something more about how things went so that the truth finally comes to light».
The podcast also delves into the topic of the use of bodycams by police forces, among the measures contained in the Security Decree converted into law on 9 June. «Bodycams are already available to officers, but no criteria for use have been established. As the case of Mattarelli demonstrates, in this way they can be not only useless, but even harmful. In short, it’s fantastic to know about these cameras being turned on, which then turn off just when it would be interesting to look at the images”, says Senator Ilaria Cucchi interviewed for the podcast.
«I became passionate about this story in a way that hasn’t happened to me in a long time», says Stefano Vergine, the journalist who wrote the podcast and specializes in investigations for which he received several journalistic awards including, in 2017, the Pulitzer Prize for the Panama Papers investigation, «because inside there is the life of a boy, the suffering of a family, the province in which I grew up, the trust of us citizens towards the institutions».
The Mattarelli family has already attempted to reopen the investigation by highlighting some inconsistencies with the suicide thesis: the way Mattarelli used to hang himself, the belt without traces of blood, the presence of unknown DNA under his nails. So far, however, all attempts have been unsuccessful.
