“She can’t have done it all by herself.” The inhabitants of Traversetolo have been repeating it for days, shocked by the news that in the garden of a villa in Vignale – a hamlet less than 2 kilometers from the town in the province of Parma – two newborns were buried, born a year apart and with the same tragic fate, but above all in shock because the one who buried them, after giving birth to them, was that “good”, “very normal, “perfectly integrated and full of friends”, “model student” 22-year-old girl, who they met walking in the center, at the bar, in the parish, with whom some even left their children because she was “perfect” as a babysitter. “She can’t have done it all by herself”. The family of Emanuele, her ex-boyfriend – and apparently the father of the second child, born on August 7 and buried a few hours later – who was not involved in the terrible story and unaware of the pregnancy, also repeats it. Chiara’s parents, who were at home with her during the 9 months of gestation, are wondering – and perhaps reproaching themselves. – this year like last year – and on a flight to New York with her daughter two days after giving birth and the gruesome burial in the garden.

All the lies of Chiara Petrolini: she continued to have aperitifs after the discovery of her son’s body

While everyone is mulling over how she did it, scribbling down her now old portrait and risking the sketch of a new one, cold and detached, following the lines of improvised psychiatric assessments made in broad terms in TV living rooms waiting for the one that the judges will eventually order, no one is asking why. No one goes deeper, except to dig even deeper into the morbidity of the details of a story that is horrid. At most, we get to sharing more dismay, remembering her in shorts and a top all summer, without the slightest plumpness. As if the fact that she didn’t have a big belly justified even those closest to her in not realizing anything. The substance that succumbs to the form.

The loneliness of young ‘monsters’

“Why was Chiara alone?” This is the question that a society, an emotional network, but above all a family should ask itself. Not that the faults of children always and necessarily have their roots in the behavior of their parents, or in deficient or complicated family backgrounds, much less that friends and acquaintances must intercept deep malaise at all costs, but that thread of responsibility in being deaf and blind with those around us, or who we simply meet, everyone should feel it on their skin. Because the horrifying crime committed twice by Chiara is only the tip of an iceberg made of indifference and absences, sometimes even more banally of superficiality, the latest family ‘oversight’ in chronological order. Just before her there was Riccardo, the 17-year-old from Paderno Dugnano who exterminated his family at home after celebrating his father’s birthday, going back less than a year there was Filippo Turetta, the 22-year-old who killed his ex-girlfriend Giulia Cecchettin because he couldn’t accept seeing her free and with a life ahead of her without him. Children – for each of these parents – without great difficulty, at most dealing with almost negligible youthful problems, such as a love story born in the halls of university that ends and you just have to wait, because “everyone has been there”. Photographs of profound solitude that lead to atrocities, about which we should question ourselves.

And what if Turetta had confronted that obsession for Giulia with a professional, encouraged by her parents who were worried about her state of mind? What if Riccardo’s mother and father had realized that “discomfort” she felt at home and confessed to investigators after the massacre? What if Chiara’s family had noticed a pregnant daughter giving birth in the bathroom? The answers, perhaps, would be tragedies avoided. And today there would be a few less young “monsters”.

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