The parents and lawyer of the two Bay Area students who received life sentences in death of an Italian officer reacted to the verdict Thursday.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The lawyer for the family of one of two Bay Area college students who received life in prison sentences for the stabbing death of an Italian police officer reacted to the verdict on Thursday.»It’s bewildering,» said Craig Peters,21-year-old Finnegan Elder’s family attorney. » They gave him and they gave Gabe a sentence that is befitting a mafia boss who wantonly kills innocent people. How could these boys possibly be in that same league?»Elder and his friend,20-year-old Gabriel Natale Hjorth, both received Italy’s harshest sentence for their crimes. On a July night in Rome, back in 2019, they were on a street corner to meet someone associated with a drug dealer. But, two police officers in plain clothes approached. in a struggle, officer Mario Cerciello Rega pinned Elder to the ground, and the young man stabbed the officer to death. An appeal of the verdict is in the works, and the Elder family’s attorney points out how different the process is in Italy.»In America the end of that first trial is most of the time the end of the road. But in Italy, it’s very different. So we’re trying to remind him that there is a whole another trial essentially, that’s going to happen at the appellate level, where hopefully we will have more sophisticated, more experienced, more reasonable and rational judges who will actually do the hard work of trying to make sense of all this and then fairly apportion justice,» Peters said.
