Italians shaken up by spate of small-town family slayings
The killings occurred in two adjacent homes on a residential street in Chieri, a suburb of the northwestern industrial city of Turin, said Col. Filippo Ricciarelli of the carabinieri paramilitary police.
Italian news reports identified the assailant as Mauro Antonello, a 40-year-old construction worker, former security guard and gun collector who had an acrimonious breakup two years ago with his wife, Carla Bergamin.
Bergamin, 40, her mother, brother and sister-in-law, as well as two neighbors and a woman who worked in the Bergamin family textile factory, were all shot and killed before Antonello took his own life, the reports said.
The couple's 7-year-old daughter was at school at the time of the slayings, the ANSA news agency said.
The massacre shocked residents of Chieri, a relatively well-off suburb of 32,000 people.
"Chieri is a tranquil place," said Antonio Piras, the manager of the Sandomenico restaurant.
"Most people work in the small textile factories in the area, the average income is high and everyone just goes about their business every day."
The slayings were the latest in a series of killings in northern Italy that have raised concerns because they were allegedly committed by family members, neighbors or youngsters — not the immigrants politicians tend to blame for crime in Italy.
On Monday, a former customs official in northern Reggio Emilia shot and killed his wife and daughter and wounded the daughter's boyfriend, in a botched murder-suicide the gunman filmed with a video camera, police said.
Gunman Renzo Finamore, 58, and the boyfriend remained in critical condition yesterday, said spokesman Sgt. Antonio Pirisi.
Two weeks ago, police found the body of a missing 14-year-old, Desiree Piovanelli, who had been stabbed to death close to her home in Leno, near Brescia in northern Italy.
Three teenagers and a 36-year-old neighbor who lived across the street have been arrested in that case, which has been front-page news.
Sociologist Gaspare Barbiellini Amidei recently wrote in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera that Italians — known for the importance they place on family — shouldn't blame society at large for the spate of violence but should look at their own family dynamics instead.
Giuseppe Roma, director of a Rome-based think tank that maps trends in Italian society, noted the recent crimes had occurred in relatively affluent towns in the north, known as Italy's industrial powerhouse.