A case of police brutality against an Italian-Slovak student in Miami, USA, shocks Italy.
Since the evening of Saturday 4/05, the newspaper Quotidiano Nazionale – and subsequently all the Italian media – have been showing bodycam images of North Miami Beach police officers showing first a conversation with police officers and then the violent behavior of the uniformed officers, outside a night club and then inside the police station, at the expense of an Italian student while he was kept immobilized and handcuffed.
According to the Italian press, 25-year-old Matteo Falcinelli is a former soccer player from Spoleto, Italy, and thanks to his exceptional athletic abilities, he transferred to Wesleyan College in North Carolina, where he graduated in business administration. He then enrolled in a master’s degree in hospitality and real estate management in Florida, where he is expected to graduate soon.
According to Quotidiano Nazionale, the story took place on the night between February 24 and 25, when the young man went (alone) to a nightclub which – according to him – he only later realized was a strip club. There he appears to have had a drink with a girl and temporarily lost his two cell phones.
The young man’s account is rather murky at this point, but it seems that the police were waiting for him outside the store since – according to the uniformed men – the 25-year-old had caused trouble in the club, from which he was kicked out.
From that moment on, the images from the uniformed security cameras show that at some point the young man touched a policeman’s license plate, which caused the reaction of the policemen who immobilized him on the ground.
The images are very harsh. After the arrest outside the club, the police take the student to the department, where they restrain him on the floor, handcuffing him, while the young man demands his rights and then screams in pain. The Italian appears to have spent quite some time on the floor of his cell – a total of 13 minutes, according to the Italian press.
Mateo was found two days later, online, by his friends, on the police website, who released him by paying $3-4,000.
The Italian press also adds that the student was hospitalized for two days due to his injuries, and that on February 29 he was transferred to a psychiatric clinic after “multiple suicide attempts following torture.”
It is emphasized at this point that the Italian student was tried and entered the PTI (pre-trail intervention) retraining program, as a result of which the judge “dropped the four charges of resisting a public official, resisting arrest without violence and trespassing, charges of which the 25-year-old was arrested”.
As the Italian press notes, the 25-year-old’s family waited until now to publicize the incident, due to fear of ‘any reprisals’.
Violent reactions to the police brutality against the 25-year-old Italian student
The issue is taking on huge proportions in Italy. Quotidiano Nazionale emphasizes that “the family wants to file a formal complaint about the abuse, false affidavits, illegal arrest and torture suffered by the young man and invoke the fourth amendment” of American law.
The 25-year-old’s mother, who is in America close to the student, talks about “real torture” that “ruined the life” of her son, but also about “Gestapo-style methods”, while declaring that she is ready to be chained, since what happened to her son to her “it must never happen again”. In fact, the woman reports, her son is struggling with psychological shock but also with various physical pains, a result of the torture that night.
Corriere della Sera speaks of “a possible appeal to the Prosecutor’s Office in Rome, which is responsible for the affairs of Italians abroad, in an attempt to give support and put pressure on the judges of the southeastern US state.” At the same time “with the participation of the consulate (of Italy), the minimum goal is to obtain written permission from the judge to leave the country”.
The Italian Foreign Ministry also intervened in this matter, which stated to Corriere della Sera that “the Italian consulate in Miami has been supporting the family for two months” and that “maximum attention has already been requested in the case of the US ambassador to Italy, reminding that the Italian Government follows with reverence every case of detention of Italian citizens abroad”.
Finally, from the US side, the news agency ANSA publishes that the Miami police “started an internal investigation into the case”.
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