The father of Finnegan Lee Elder, the 19-year-old accused stabbing to death of Carabiniere police officer Mario Cerciello Rega in Rome last week, visited his son at Rome's Regina Coeli prison on Thursday. It is the first time that Ethan Elder is meeting his son since his arrest last week. Police said that Finnegan Lee Elder has confessed to stabbing Cerciello Rega while his friend, Gabriel Christian Natale-Hjorth assaulted the slain officer's partner at the end of a chain of events sparked by a drugs deal that went wrong.
Natale-Hjorth's father has said that his son did not know about the knife that his friend allegedly used to kill the police officer. The Associated Press quoted Fabrizio Natale as saying that Natale-Hjorth "can't come to terms with what happened" in a statement released through a lawyer after visiting his son in a Rome jail. "We are very upset by the predicament he's in, but we are all fully convinced of his innocence," the statement continued.
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