The Turin Court of Appeal has acquitted Alex Cottoia, 22, who four years ago murdered his father with 34 stab wounds.

The Italian judiciary ruled that “it was a legitimate defense” because the young man’s father had continually behaved violently to both his wife and his two children.

The murder had taken place on April 30, 2020, outside Turin, following a heated argument in which Cotoya’s father had repeatedly accused his wife of cheating on him. The 22-year-old claimed he fatally stabbed his father before he went to the kitchen, found the knife he was looking for, and murdered himself, his brother, and his mother.

Alex Cotoya had been acquitted by the trial court, while the appeals court had sentenced him to six years and two months in prison for manslaughter, recognizing several mitigating factors. The Supreme Court of Rome, however, subsequently ruled that this last trial had to be repeated, and today, finally, the new, acquittal verdict was issued.

The 22-year-old’s defence lawyer recalled that on the day of the tragic incident, Alex’s father had called his wife, who worked in a supermarket, more than a hundred times on his mobile phone because he was convinced that she was maintaining a connection with a colleague. When the woman returned home, he began to berate her even before he entered their apartment. In the months leading up to the murder, the two brothers had begun recording, on their cell phones, their father’s fits of anger, fearing, they testified, that he might murder either them or their mother.

According to the prosecutor, however, “this is certainly a reaction to a hated man, but not a legitimate defense.”