The trial over the death of Chiara Jaconis, the 30-year-old visitor from Padua who died after being struck on the head by a fragment of a statuette that fell from a home in Naples' Quartieri Spagnoli, has been postponed to November 27.
The hearing was previously expected to open on October 23 before a single judge of the first section of the Court of Naples. That date has now been superseded by the postponement to November 27 reported by Il Mattino.
Why the parents are on trial
The defendant in the case is not the boy who allegedly threw the objects. He was 13 at the time and therefore not criminally liable under Italian law.
Instead, his parents have been committed for trial for manslaughter in concurrence, on the allegation of failure to supervise their child. The parents have denied owning the objects and have contested the reconstruction of events presented against them.
The charge therefore does not concern an accusation that the parents threw anything themselves. It concerns whether a lack of supervision contributed to the fatal outcome, a question the trial in Naples will have to examine.
The unresolved technical question
A separate juvenile proceeding has focused on the material facts of what fell and what caused the lethal injury.
According to reporting by la Repubblica, the reconstruction describes two objects thrown from above: a statuette depicting the pharaoh Akhenaten and a bust of Queen Nefertiti. It has not yet been established which of the two objects struck Chiara Jaconis.
To address that gap, the juvenile Court of Appeal has ordered a ballistic assessment covering the trajectory, weight and characteristics of the blunt object. The expert appointment is scheduled for December 17.
That assessment is intended to help clarify which object produced the fatal fragment, a point that remains unresolved in the current reconstruction.
What is scheduled next
Two procedural steps are currently scheduled in the available reporting: the postponed trial hearing in Naples on November 27, concerning the parents' alleged criminal negligence, and the expert appointment in the juvenile case on December 17, concerning the trajectory and characteristics of the objects.
The question of which object caused the fatal injury remains subject to that further technical examination. The circumstances of the initial incident are reported with different dates in the sources consulted, with September 15, 2024 given for the injury and September 17, 2024 for the death in hospital.
