U.S. Teen Confesses in Rome Police Killing, Italian Police Say

(Bloomberg) -- It began Thursday night with a deal gone wrong near the bars and restaurants of Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood: What was sold as illicit drugs turned out to be crushed up aspirin, according to Italian news reports.

It ended in the early hours of Friday, across town near the Vatican, as a bungled attempt by the buyers to extract what they’d paid for ended with a Carabinieri police officer dead from eight stab wounds, one to his heart.

By the end of Friday, the police said they’d arrested two 19-year-old Americans staying at a hotel near the scene of the killing, finding a knife hidden above the ceiling panels of their room. By Saturday morning they’d extracted a confession from one of them that he’d killed the undercover officer, Mario Cerciello Rega, the police said.

In his confession, the alleged killer lamented to police and prosecutors that it had been a case of mistaken identity, the Ansa newswire reported. “I didn’t think he was a policeman, I was afraid of being cheated again,” the teenager reportedly said.

The names of the two Americans have been disclosed in Italian media but not officially released by the authorities, and neither could be reached for comment. Several reports identified them as students without saying if or where they were currently studying.

The killing dominated news coverage in Italy in part because murders are rare (seven murders in Rome this year through the end of May, according to Il Messaggero newspaper), and in part because of memories of another case involving young foreigners: the 2007 murder in Perugia of British student Meredith Kercher, for which American college student Amanda Knox was tried and eventually acquitted after spending four years in an Italian jail.

Botched Drug Deal?

The details of how Thursday night’s events turned deadly are still sketchy, with police releasing bare details and newspapers acknowledging conflicting information. Taken together the reports say it started with the deceptive drug deal, followed by the Americans stealing a backpack. While some news reports concluded it was the dealer’s backpack, the police simply said it was stolen from “an Italian citizen” to whom they referred as a victim.

The two men then made threatening phone calls to the backpack’s owner, saying they’d return his property in return for the payment of 100 euros ($111) and a gram of cocaine, according to the police statement. The calls were made possible because the stolen backpack contained the Italian’s phone, the news reports said.

The owner of the backpack then contacted police, who sent plainclothes officers to the arranged hand-off near the Americans’ hotel in the Prati neighborhood, near the Vatican.

It was at that meeting that the teenagers “did not hesitate to engage in a scuffle, which culminated in the tragic mortal wounding of the Deputy Brigadier,” according to the police statement.

The men, who were interrogated at a Carabinieri barracks, are now being detained under a prosecutor’s order for alleged murder and extortion, the police said. In addition to the large knife they found in the hotel room, police also recovered the clothes worn during the altercation, they said.

Cerciello Rega, the police officer, had turned 35 only 13 days earlier, and had been married just 43 days before his death from eight stab wounds, the Carabinieri said on Facebook.

“In its naked essence, even the biggest tragedy is made of numbers,” the post said. “And tragedy bears the biggest figure: Infinity.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Vernon Silver in Rome at vtsilver@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Robert Blau at rblau1@bloomberg.net, Andrew Davis, Sara Marley

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