Three gunshots, one within a few seconds of the other. The last one was the deadly one. It happened to Mangone. A man took his own life after trying to kill his wife, who saved herself by escaping the homicidal fury, running away from home, holding her five-year-old son in her arms, while her twelve-year-old daughter was at school. The family drama took place around 10 yesterday morning, in Corso Garibaldi, in the heart of the historic center of Mango, when the man, Mario Francesco Provenzano, 57 years old, an assistant chief coordinator of the Penitentiary Police on duty in the Cosenza prison took the gun.
When he returned home, he allegedly had a very heated argument with his wife. An argument of the usual kind, with repeated death threats. During the argument that took place in the bedroom, the man, overcome by anger, took out his service pistol and fired the first shot, when the woman, perceiving his intentions, had picked up the child to give herself away. escape, and a second shot, when mother and son were on the doorstep, fortunately, without being hit by bullets.
Once out on the street, they providentially took refuge with a family in the neighborhood. At that point, the attacker decided to end it all, shooting himself fatally at the top of an internal staircase that leads to the door of the house. Immediately afterwards, the inspection by the carabinieri of the Mangone station and the Rogliano company, then the intervention of the “118” with the health workers who were unable to do anything other than confirm that the man had died. Then, it was the turn of the chief prosecutor of Cosenza, Dr. Mario Spagnuolo, of the provincial commander of the force, Colonel Saverio Spoto, and of the leaders of the Cosenza penitentiary police.
The first checks were able to acquire useful elements to establish the dynamics of the tragedy, which began in the bedroom, where a cartridge case was found, with a continuation in the direction of the door of the house, where a second cartridge case was found and , then, on the staircase where the third cartridge case was found next to the body. An initial interrogation of the woman provided the first answers to the questions of the men of the force, answers which clarified the progress of the attack and which provided some useful elements to explain the motive.
Obviously, the investigations need to be explored in every detail. The man’s psychological fragility would have emerged, which would have put him in difficulty several times in the workplace, causing him a stressful situation, probably aggravated by the recent death of his father. Before being enlisted in the Penitentiary Police, he was a bartender and had emigrated to the North, where he had lived with the beating expectation of returning. Hiring him as a prison officer had not resolved his psychological discomfort, which led him to suffer from a sort of jealousy syndrome, which, by unanimous opinion, has always been completely unfounded. This was probably the reason that, some time ago, would have led the woman to leave her precarious mobility job in derogation to dedicate herself completely to the care of the family. But this was not enough to avoid such a tragic epilogue.