A father kept vigil for hours beside the body of his 15-year-old son, which lay covered by a sheet, before finding the strength to speak with the man whose car had struck and killed the boy on a crosswalk, offering him words of encouragement. “It is not your fault,” Alessandro Pattaro, the father of the teenager who was hit while riding his bike in Loreggia (Padua), reportedly told the driver. The adolescent’s mother, who arrived at the scene with her husband, was overcome by shock and had to be taken to the emergency room.
Despite his own overwhelming grief, Martin’s father showed profound compassion toward the 31-year-old driver of the Ford involved in the crash. The young driver was sobbing uncontrollably, running his hands through his hair and swearing he had not seen the cyclist. “Don’t feel guilty, you couldn’t have done anything to avoid the impact. I put myself in your shoes, be strong,” the man’s words were reported today by the local paper ‘Il Gazzettino’.
The local police are investigating the exact circumstances of the accident, which occurred at one of the pedestrian crossings that emerges from the Treviso-Ostiglia cycle path, intersecting with Via Malfattini, a municipal road connected to a nearby ring road.