A husband who brutally machine-gunned his wife and daughter to death in Italy has avoided a life sentence after a judge ruled he had ‘understandably human motives’.
Salvatore Montefusco, 70, shot his wife Gabriela Trandafir, 47, and their daughter, Renata, 22, in June 2022 in front of the couple’s young son.
But instead of being handed a life sentence, as requested by the Prosecutor’s Office in the case of the double femicide, Montefusco was given just thirty years because of the ‘the human comprehensibility of the reasons that pushed the perpetrator to commit the crime’.
The Modena Court of Assizes were reportedly lenient on the killer after explaining he had reached the age of 70 with no criminal record and would not have carried out the heinous crime ‘if not driven by the nefarious family dynamics that had been triggered over time’.
The Modena Prosecutor’s Office had requested life imprisonment following the vicious slaying, but the judges on October 9 excluded premeditation, abject and futile motives, having acted with cruelty and considering the mistreatment to be absorbed in the murder, reports Corriere Di Bologna.
The sentence reveals in over 200 pages how the shooting took place after Montefusco had experienced several bouts of conflict with the two women, with mutual complaints being filed.
According to judges, the motive behind the double-murder was ‘the psychological condition of profound discomfort, humiliation and enormous frustration experienced by the defendant’.
This was ‘due to the climate of very high conflict that had been created within the marital menage and the concrete eventuality that he himself would have to abandon the family home’.
Salvatore Montefusco, 70, murdered both his wife and young daughter in June 2022. This image is being published in Italian media who claim it is the killer
Gabriela Trandafir, 47, right, and Renata, 22, left, were killed by the man who has been handed a 30-year prison sentence instead of a life sentence
The judges reportedly found it ‘plausible’ that once Montefusco was repeatedly told by his daughter that she was leaving the family home, it ’caused in his soul, as he himself has repeatedly underlined, that emotional and existential blackout that would have led him to run to get the gun’.
The firearm was reportedly located just a mere few metres away, and in a moment of fury he had grabbed it and killed both his daughter and wife.
According to the Italian report, Montefusco had previously threatened to kill the pair.
The attorney representing the family of the two victims, Barbara Iannuccelli, was left stunned by the sentence.
‘The very young victim Renata Trandafir wanted to become a lawyer in order to be able to defend herself from the daily violence she and her mother had to endure’, she said.
‘Today, she was spared the experience of having to understand why the merciless killer of two unprotected women could benefit from such benevolence.
‘Generic extenuating circumstances sweeping away any aggravating circumstance for …human understanding’, she said, quoting the sentence, ‘we are all navigating in a sea of strong disbelief’.