The Italian mother of a murdered 18-year-old has attended court wearing a printed T-shirt of her daughter’s dismembered body, after her killer appealed against part of his conviction.
Pamela Mastropietro was murdered and dismembered in January 2018 by Nigerian drug dealer Innocent Oseghale. He has appealed against part of the sentence where he was originally found to have sexually assaulted the teenager before killing her.
Mastropietro’s mother, Alessandra Verni, attended the appeal court in Perugia yesterday wearing a T-shirt that showed the horrific images of her daughter’s body. At one point a clash broke out in the courtroom with Verni and Oseghale being dragged away from each other by police. The court hearing will resume next month.
‘Have you seen what they did to her?’ Verni said of her murdered daughter. ‘That man, who raped and tortured her, should rot in jail.’
Her T-shirt showed her daughter’s dismembered head. The series of harrowing pictures were also formed so that the detached body parts made up the structure of a body.
Oseghale, 32, was found guilty and sentenced to jail in 2019 for murdering 18-year-old Mastropietro, and is appealing against part of his conviction for rape. The judge asked Oseghale if he intended to participate in the next hearing in February. After discussing with his lawyer, he told the court that he would not. Verni, who was in the courtroom at the time wearing the T-shirt, yelled aloud: ‘Now even an executioner is asked if he wants to participate in the hearing or not. Let’s throw it a red carpet at this point as well.’
The two then came face-to-face and as police led Oseghale out of the courtroom, he shouted: ‘Enough judicial oppression’. Verni charged up to him and screamed: ‘Tell me… tell me what you want.’ Both were immediately removed by courtroom police.
Oseghale’s life sentence will be shortened if the court of appeals finds him innocent of rape.
Mastropietro was killed after she left an addiction recovery centre in Macerata in the Marche region in early 2018. Investigators understood that she had decided to leave the facility and made the journey to the local train station on foot. Having left the recovery centre, Mastropietro attempted to find drugs in Macerata. She then met Oseghale, a local drug dealer from Nigeria, then aged 29.
A day later, a passerby noticed two abandoned suitcases in a small ditch. Mastropietro’s mutilated and dismembered body was found inside the case. Drug dealer Oseghale was accused of selling Mastropietro drugs, before he then detained, raped, and stabbed her. Police found Mastropietro’s bloodied clothing at Oseghale’s home. The Nigerian claimed in his testimony that Mastropietro died from a heroin overdose.
However, an autopsy showed that Mastropietro died due to successive abdominal stabbings. It also found that her body was dismembered while she was still alive. The Nigerian was accused of murder, sexual assault, concealment, and destruction of a body. He disputed the charges at the trial in February 2019. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, with eighteen months in solitary confinement.
