The knife they ‘killed a cop’ with
Italyy reveals US teens’ ‘murder weapon’
Italian cops released this photo Tuesday of the leatherbound combat knife they say an American teen used to fatally stab a Roman policeman — who was unarmed at the time.
Suspect Finnegan Lee Elder, a 19-year-old former high-school rugby player from California, brought the hefty knife with its 7inch blade with him from the US to Italy and used it to kill undercover officer Mario Cerciello Rega in a drug bust gone awry early Friday, authorities said.
Elder’s buddy Gabriel Christian Natale-Hjorth, 18, punched Rega’s partner during the attack, according to officials.
The photo of the murder weapon surfaced as authorities revealed that Rega was unarmed when he was attacked — because he’d forgotten his gun back at the police station.
“Cerciello did not have the weapon with him at the time of the attack but only the handcuffs. He had forgotten it,’’ Rome police commander Francesco Gargaro told reporters at a press conference, according to Italian newspaper La Repubblica. “We found it in his locker in the barracks.
“But it does not change” the case, the top cop said, because “like [his partner, Rega] would not have had time to react.”
Deputy prosecutor Nunzia E’lia noted that the two suspects reacted differently to hearing the cop was dead.
Natale-Hjorth kept saying, “But is he really dead? Is he really dead?” while Elder “shed some tears,” the official said.
Authorities said Elder told them he had the knife on him when he and Natale-Hjorth went to score cocaine near their fourstar hotel because he was “afraid something could go wrong.’’
The pair had just been duped by a dealer, who gave them aspirin powder instead of cocaine. The teens allegedly swiped his satchel and cellphone in retaliation and demanded some $100 and a gram of coke to return it.
The dealer called the cops, who set up a sting. When the teens went to meet the dealer, they were met by undercovers, including Rega and his partner.
A brawl broke out, and Rega was fatally stabbed 11 times.
The teens fled the scene but were tracked down hours later at their nearby hotel — where cops found the knife stashed behind some false-ceiling tiles in their room, authorities said. The blade had already been wiped clean, officials said.
Elder, who had just finished his first year of community college, told cops he was boozed up and on prescription drugs at the time. He claimed he was acting in self-defense because Rega was strangling him.
But a judge noted that there were no marks on his neck and denied bail for him and his alleged cohort Monday.