Cogne homicide

The so-called Cogne case (known in Italian as caso Cogne) involved the death of three-year-old Samuele Lorenzi on 30 January 2002 while sleeping in his parents' bed in his family home in the mountain village of Cogne, in Aosta Valley, northern Italy. The cause of death was found to be a blow to the skull. The murder weapon has never been found.

In July 2004 an Italian court sentenced Samuele's mother Anna Maria Franzoni to 30 years in prison for aggravated murder. However, on 27 April 2007 the Corte d'Assise d'appello in Turin reduced the penalty to Franzoni to 16 years of jail for homicide. Franzoni always refuted the charge, asserting that an intruder had killed her child in the few minutes she left home to accompany her older son Davide, then-six years old to the school bus station.

Mrs. Franzoni, Samuele's mother, testified she went out for a while, at 8 a.m. to accompany the elder son (Davide, aged 6) to the school bus stop, just a few hundred meters from home, leaving alone her youngest son. Back home a few minutes later, Franzoni claimed she found Samuele lying in the bed, covered by a comforter and gasping in a pool of blood. The victim, a three-year old child, was sleeping in his parents' bed and had not attempted to escape. The woman ran to the window to attract the attention of a neighbor, to whom she shouted, "My baby's head has exploded", then called 118 (the Italian emergency telephone number) requesting assistance because "My child has vomited blood and stopped breathing."

Shortly after, neighbor psychiatrist Ada Satragni arrived on the scene. The doctor believed Franzoni that the child's skull would have "exploded", stating that a cerebral aneurysm may actually increase the intracranial pressure, causing the explosion of bones. A few days later, Dr. Satragni released an interview in which she proposed that perhaps Samuele, aware of being home alone, had desperately burst in tears and that "The violent crying might have caused the opening of the head." At the time, Dr. Satragni devoted herself to wash the dying child and then carried him out, in front of the house, despite the cold weather and without any caution to protect his head or neck. Another neighbor, Mrs. Daniela Ferrod, noticed that, for the entire time, Mrs. Franzoni remained motionless and silent, without saying anything or even trying to touch her son. Upon arrival of the helicopter that would carry Samuele to the ER, neither Mrs Franzoni nor her husband (Stefano Lorenzi, surveyor, 31 years), who had been informed of the tragedy by phone, followed their child.

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Wikipedia