Paderno, a small town 20 km from Milan. A 17-year-old young man killed his 12-year-old brother, turning on him, then his father and mother. The weapon, once again, the knife, increasingly the weapon that accompanies the very young of all social classes in the emotional resolution of their problems. No motive, normal affluent family, normal boy, school, sports, some introversion.
Shock in the country and close friendships and relatives, everything normal, no cracks, what could have happened? Clearly the first explanations are given by the specialists, even before the investigators. Parents know everything about padel but nothing about their children, money is talked about but never really talked about. The family has been over for a long time and no one wants to admit it.
All right and all at the same time incomplete. As the great Tolstoy said in the incipit of Anna Karenina, all happy families are alike; each is unhappy in its own way. It is on that specific trait of individual unhappiness that the mystery begins, for writers as for journalists and investigators. We will learn more in the bad days, but certainly here we are at the mirror reversal of Sharon Verzeni’s crime. The fatal encounter with the Other, the casual predator, and the hell that grinds inside life’s most important relationships, those of family. That hell leaves us speechless today, and of little use are the merciless statistics on proximity crimes. Let us look a little more in the mirror, all of us, and see what lies beneath our glossy image.
The article The mystery of unhappiness comes from TheNewyorker.
