“I think the parents were hoping this could be an experience that would help her mature.” Thus Sean Elder, uncle of Finnegan Lee Elder, the 21-year-old American sentenced to life imprisonment together with 20-year-old Gabriel Natale Hjorth for stabbing to death the deputy police sergeant Mario Cerciello Rega, to the Washington Post in an interview released a few days before the announcement of the sentence. “His mother had gone to Rome when she was twenty and had worked as an au pair – continues Elder’s uncle – she thought that for him too, being in a new environment and having to learn to be alone would help him mature” . “I think he was very depressed and hoped for the same thing,” she added, explaining that her nephew has had drug problems since high school. And that before leaving for Europe he had attended a year of community college in San Diego. The boy had become “very paranoid, I don’t know for what reasons”, said his uncle, referring to the fact that the young man had brought a marine knife bought in California, the murder weapon, to Europe.
