After days of hypotheses and research, here is the twist: “I killed Sharon Vezeni, I did it for no reason”. The shocking confession comes from the so-called “man on a bicycle”, filmed that night by a camera right near the place where the girl was stabbed. The executioner is a 31-year-old, born and raised in Milan, but from an African family.

Riding the Racism

This detail was enough to unleash a wave of racist and xenophobic hatred in public opinion, which will surely be widely exploited also at a political level. The “ethnic cause” appears even more relevant, in the eyes of many, since the murder seems to have been committed – apparently – without any kind of motive: neither sexual nor economic. And so the stereotypical image of the immigrant, crazy and out of control, like a wild animal, also becomes the most immediate, simplest, most credible explanation. But this is only because many people are prejudiced and have short memories.

The Italian Killers

For example, just a couple of years ago, a similar episode was committed by an Italian, white and with no criminal record. I’m talking about Andrea Tombolini, who on October 27, 2022 entered a shopping center in Assago (Milan) and, without any explanation, stabbed six people, killing one. He also justified his action by saying “I don’t know what came over me.” Yet, the psychiatric evaluation determined that at that moment the 47-year-old was fully capable of understanding and willing, and in fact he was sentenced to 19 years and 4 months in prison. But while “those on the right” will focus on the ethnic origin, “those on the left” will point the finger more at the gender of the executioner. In fact, there are already those who are classifying the murder as “femicide”, for the simple fact that we are faced with a man who killed a woman, perhaps forgetting that femicide, to be such, must have a motive linked to the gender of the victim, while (at the time of writing) this motive does not appear to exist.

There is always a reason

So why did Sharon Verzeni die? Can a person really kill another, just like that, for no reason? The answer is no, they can’t. Unless the murderer was totally incapable of understanding and wanting at the time of the crime, or was in the grip of a strong psychotic delirium (difficult given that he had the lucidity to escape immediately afterwards), there is always a reason. Perhaps it is not immediately identifiable, perhaps it is unconscious, but it is there. In most cases, this type of crime has a common thread: social envy. “I killed them because they were happy”, was for example the motive confessed by Antonio De Marco, who in September 2020 murdered a couple of lovers in Lecce. A similar dynamic for the Murazzi murder, which occurred in February 2019, where the killer, also Italian, casually killed a passerby, and in that case too his justification was envy: “I chose him because he was happy”. It would not surprise me then if the same dynamic was behind Sharon Verzeni’s death. However, we must dig deeper, because we cannot be satisfied with the first easy answer that comes to mind. Crimes like this raise many questions, from the theme of integration to that of loneliness and psychological distress in general, with psychosocial health remaining at the center of everything.