Two California students went on trial in Italy on Wednesday in the fatal stabbing of a Rome police officer during a brawl that shocked Italy.
Finnegan Lee Elder, 20, and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, 19, high school classmates from Mill Valley, near San Francisco, could face life sentences for the killing last July of Mario Cerciello Rega, 35, a member of Italy’s paramilitary Carabinieri police.
Cerciello Rega and a fellow officer, Andrea Varriale, were in plainclothes when they stopped the California men after a drug deal went wrong in the early hours of July 26.
Varriale has said that he and Cerciello Rega announced they were police officers. The Americans have said that they did not, and that they mistook them for drug dealers.
Read the full story on LATimes.com.