Evaristo Scalco, the killer archer for the Court of Assizes was “An executioner, but he shows repentance”

«A vigilante, a man of order». Capable of shooting a “deadly” arrow towards another person, “to demonstrate that he is a man” in one piece “, who knows how to keep faith both with the commitments made and with the threats uttered towards those who harass him” . A “motive so flimsy that it cannot even be compared to the enormity of the criminal action”.

However, according to the Court of Assizes, the shipwright Evaristo Scalco, who on the night between 1 and 2 November 2022 killed Javier Alfredo Miranda Romero in the historic center of Genoa with an arrow, as soon as he realized he had hit the The worker born in Peru in a fatal way, “showed a form of serious regret.” He tried to help his victim, in short, showing a sort of repentance, and for this reason too his sentence was reduced to 23 years. A thesis that prosecutor Arianna Ciavattini does not agree with, so much so that during the trial she had asked for a life sentence.

In the sentence, the President of the Court Massimo Cusatti reconstructs what happened on that tragic night. Romero had gone out to celebrate the birth of his son with his friend and compatriot Luna Ayala. The two had placed themselves under Scalco’s window. The craftsman had seen one of the two urinating on a shutter, had looked out of the window of his house and had rudely addressed them: “Go away, you foreigners…”. The two friends had responded to him, but the first argument had ended there. Only then both friends, for reasons that have nothing to do with Scalco, returned to the craftsman’s house. Who, unnerved by the explosion of two firecrackers, a circumstance not documented but deemed truthful by the Court, took a bow and arrow: «Only from the perspective of the “executioner” – continue the judges – can the sentences, tinged with an arrogance to the limits of sadism, which he addressed from the top of his window “Does it hurt? You have been warned!” to a Romero who was certain he had already struck with a deadly three-edged arrow but who he did not immediately realize he had mortally wounded.”

For the Assizes, therefore, the futile reasons exist: «Scalco remains (he alone, unlike the contenders) still mentally “armed” (as is, in concrete terms, his arc from the end of the first argument dating back to about a quarter of now before the fact), leaves the window open, as if to “seek” new opportunities for conflict on an evening which, it must be remembered, falls during the Halloween period and therefore lends itself to potential harassment and consequent clashes…” and at the end he shoots the arrow «to demonstrate that he is a man “all in one piece”, who knows how to keep faith both with the commitments made and with the threats uttered towards those who harass him».

However, according to the Court, there is no aggravating circumstance of racial hatred: «”The anger thickened towards the two molesters, after the first argument which stopped about ten minutes before midnight, essentially regardless of any correlation with their foreign nationality; it is also true that Luna Ayala declared at the hearing that she heard him utter the well-known phrase “foreigners of s…!”, with which he accompanied the invitation to leave formulated after realizing that Miranda Romero had urinated against the opposite wall at his window… But the hypothesis that the accused caused his death due to the peculiar ethnicity of the two Peruvians is completely unsupported: which should lead us to presume, against all logical evidence, that if it had been of two thugs of Italian nationality, Scalco would have abstained from any censorship and related “punitive reaction” towards them even if he had caught one of the two intent on urinating in the open. The reality is that the accused intended to react to that gesture as such, regardless of the nationality of whoever was the perpetrator.”

The consideration therefore remains that Evaristo Scalco «before the fact he was certainly the last person who could be considered capable of carrying out such a reckless action. And yet, even a person with such a regular life had his moment of darkness, of complete blackout of the capacity for self-control with which it is also reasonable to assume that he was well equipped.”