Sergio Ruocco, the partner of Sharon Verzeni, the 33-year-old woman killed in Terno d'Isola, marched alongside his family in the procession of San Donato and was also present at the demonstration against gender violence. It doesn't stop, he explains today The Corriere della Sera who interviewed him. He doesn't hide. “Rather than stay home – he says – I wanted to come too. I'm going for a walk and write a few messages. The case of Sharon, stabbed while she was jogging at night in the village, is still a mystery. “They don't tell us anything and, anyway, now they advise us to keep quiet. What we know, we read online and in the newspapers, and it's not always accurate,” the man explains to the newspaper. It was wrong, for example, “not to want to marry Sharon. It's not like that. We had just finished the engagement course and wanted to take the time to calmly organize the wedding in 2025. We were starting to look at restaurants.”
Ruocco's hypotheses
Ruocco had met Verzeni in 2011 in Bottanuco, with friends. He still can't understand how all this could have happened to his girlfriend. “We don't understand. The first few days I thought about the drug dealers in the square (in Terno d'Isola there is a problem of degradation right in the central square, where the girl passed during her last walk; 200 meters later she was stabbed, editor's note). I thought she had seen something she shouldn't have seen, but now I don't believe it anymore. Drug dealers do their thing and don't even look at you,” he explains. No stalker hypothesis (“If it had been like that, I hope he would have told me”). Sharon went out every night: “Yes, almost. I usually go to bed around 9:30-10pm, because I wake up before 6am and I work all day (Ruocco, 37, is a plumber, originally from Seriate and has parents and two brothers, editor's note). She often went out alone, usually around 11pm (while on the night of the murder it was midnight, editor's note). When we went there together, we also met other girls who were walking alone and in the square there is a security car stopped.”
“I didn't find out about her until the next afternoon.”
“Sharon was good, maybe too good,” Ruocco says. Then he recounts the night of the murder: “We watched TV, but there was nothing good and then I saw two things about work on my phone and then I fell asleep. She had three games on her cell phone and started playing, maybe she stayed out late because of that.” The military took him away that night: “Compared to what Sharon went through, it’s nothing. They kept asking me, ‘You have to tell us what happened,’ but how did I know? I didn’t realize it at the time, I realized later that they had to do it this way. What I regret is that I didn’t learn of her death until 4 p.m. the next afternoon (the murder took place on July 30 at 00:50, Sharon died on arrival at the hospital, ed). Then they told me: “Now you can go home, go back to your life.” But at that moment, I would have preferred that they keep me there, to help them. If the police had not accompanied me to my father's house, I don't know if I would have made it.” And he also talks about how close he is to the 39-year-old's father, Bruno Verzeni: “Without him, I don't know if I would be here now.”
“I don't know how I'll live without Sharon”
“I know the police are doing everything they can, but the further we go, the harder it is for me. I would like to do something, I am used to doing it. Instead, I have to sit still and wait. Then, I don't know if it will be harder tomorrow, I don't know how I will live without Sharon. It is hard to wake up in the morning and not have her next to you in bed.” He remembers her: “Her smile and her character. After all (and for the first time he smiles slightly, ed) supported me for thirteen years.”
(on the cover, the partner of Sharon Verzeni, the 33-year-old woman killed in the street of Terno d'Isola, during the woman's funeral in Bottanuco, in the Bergamo region, on August 3, 2024. ANSA/MICHELE MARAVIGLIA)
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