Zanardi, a year ago the accident. The family: “We have not lost hope”

“We have never lost hope, not even now. His fiber is always the same, that of a man who has never given up on anything”. His wife Daniela Manni and his son Niccolò are always next to Alex Zanardi, who has been fighting his last battle for exactly one year: after a dozen surgeries, he is now hospitalized in the Spinal Unit and Serious Brain Injury Unit of the San Bortolo hospital in Vicenza. According to the doctors, after changing five hospitals, the famous 54-year-old patient has made little progress, so much so that the rehabilitation sessions now also take place in an armchair, and not just lying on the bed. But the path still appears long: the luminaries of medicine who visited him speak of a man who is alert but with minimal interaction. On 19 June 2020, the former Formula 1 champion and Paralympic athlete was seriously injured, crashing into a truck. During a solidarity demonstration, which was touring Italy, organized by its Obiettivo 3, a non-profit organization that deals with starting and supporting sport for disabled athletes, Alex Zanardi with the handbike traveled the provincial road 146 in the municipality of Pienza ( Siena): at km 39 + 800, near the crossroads for Sant’Anna in Camprena, suddenly, in the opposite direction, a truck drove by Marco Ciacci, 46, resident in Castelnuovo Berardenga (Si ). A few moments later, the champion, after losing his balance, found himself thrown against the bumper of the truck, causing multiple fractures to his face and head.As a due action, the Prosecutor of Siena immediately investigated the driver of the truck, hypothesizing the crime of very serious negligent injuries. At the end of April, the prosecutor Salvatore Vitello requested the dismissal of the proceedings “not seeing any causal link between the conduct of Ciacci driving the articulated vehicle and the determination of the road accident following which Zanardi reported serious injuries”. Attorney Vitello, “the driver of the truck was traveling at a moderate speed and in any case well below the speed limit set on that stretch of road”. According to the investigations directed by the Prosecutor’s Office, Ciacci reacted “promptly at the sight of the cyclist by implementing an emergency maneuver (steering towards the right edge of the carriageway) to move away from the centerline and try to avoid the impact with the handbike led by Zanardi; impact that unfortunately occurred entirely within the lane pertaining to the articulated lorry “. A reconstruction contested by the Zanardi family, through its trusted lawyer, the Paduan lawyer Carlo Covi, who before the investigating judge of the Court of Siena requested “an investigation integration”, or to reopen the investigations with further technical investigations on the dynamics of the accident, and also claimed the forced indictment for the truck driver under investigation. “The trial is not going to take place and so I hope to find equally guaranteed powers of attorney when I defend the defendants”, said the lawyer Covi, commenting on the prosecutor’s request for dismissal. “We ask the judge for a careful evaluation, a trial be held to ascertain the facts. If there is a solid line it cannot be invaded and there are photos that testify that the truck has invaded the line with the front wheels”. the parties are awaiting the verdict of the judge for preliminary investigations of the Court of Siena, Ilaria Cornetti, who at the end of the hearing on 26 May reserved the decision on the request for dismissal. For his part, the Grosseto lawyer Massimiliano Arcioni, lawyer of Ciacci, asked the judge to accept the request for dismissal as formulated by the Prosecutor. As for Marco Ciacci, life has changed for him too since that June 19 a year ago and today he confides to his friends that he is “sorry but aware of having done what he could to try to avoid the impact. And just as the Zanardi family suffers on one side, there is also one on the other who, albeit to a different extent, suffers from the accusations made against his loved one “. The legal matter, beyond the decision that the investigating judge will take, could drag on for a long time. “There was an invasion of the lane by the truck which was decisive for Alex Zanardi’s reaction, causing the steering maneuver to the right, which resulted in the loss of control of the vehicle. If the truck had been regularly inside his lane the accident would not have happened “, disputes the lawyer Covi.” We absolutely do not agree with the request for filing or the conclusions reached by the expert opinion of the technical consultant of the Public Prosecutor, engineer Dario Vangi, who maintains – explained the lawyer Covi – that having just passed the center line did not cause the accident. The question is: is it possible to pass ‘just’ with a red light? of the consultant about the fact that the truck crossing the center line was not the cause of Zanardi’s reaction. It is not possible that there is no responsibility of the truck driver in the accident: Zanardi saw him arrive and ste he jumped up suddenly because he invaded the ward “. Professor Dario Vangi, mechanical engineer and consultant to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, established that the trespassing of the center line by the truck was minimal and the chief prosecutor Vitello accepted this thesis.” In the aforementioned dynamic ” , according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, in fact, “the position of the articulated lorry on the carriageway had no causal effect and in particular the circumstance that shortly before the impact, in addressing the curve to the left, Ciacci had moved closer to the centerline , trampling it halfway with the front left wheels and passing it by a few centimeters with the rear ones; with consequent exclusion of culpable criminal responsibility for the suspect “.