Almost six years have passed since the death of Stefano Cucchi, and yet his sister Ilaria is still tirelessly fighting — inside and outside the courtrooms — to reveal the truth about what happened to her brother, and to finally get justice for him.

How did Stefano Cucchi die?

The story of Stefano's death is an example of the failure of the Italian justice system. He was arrested on the night of October 15, 2009, for dealing a small amount of drugs in a park of Rome. He died one week later, while still in the custody of the state. During this time, Stefano was kept in a number of institutional places: the two Carabinieri stations of Appia and Tor Vergata; the transfer and security cells in the courthouse in Rome; the infirmary and the cells of the Regina Coeli prison; the emergency room of the Fatebenefratelli hospital and, finally, the secure ward of the Sandro Pertini hospital.

Stefano was first abused, then neglected and ultimately left to die. The shocking pictures of his body in the morgue, which have been published on request of the family by the NGOs A Buon Diritto and Antigone and later by the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, speak for themselves. How could that have happened while he was in official custody? Whose fault is that?

Who is to blame?

The judicial proceedings on Stefano's death started back in 2010 and failed to provide satisfactory answers to these questions. Despite the doubts about the possible responsibility of the Carabinieri who arrested him — with some asserting that it was indeed in one of the two Carabinieri stations that Stefano had been beaten up — the trial focused exclusively on the responsibility of the three prison officers who successively held Stefano in custody and on the culpability of the doctors and the nurses of the Pertini hospital where he died.

In June 2013, the court of first instance acquitted the prison officers and the nurses, thus condemning (for culpable manslaughter) only the six doctors. Then, one year later — in October 2014 — the appeals court overturned that decision and acquitted all those accused because of insufficient evidence. This means that, as of today, no one is responsible for Stefano's death.

The Cucchi family's lawyer, Fabio Anselmo (who has also been involved with other famous cases of deaths in custody, such as those of Federico Aldrovandi and Giuseppe Uva), appealed to Italy's highest court. On December 15, 2015, the Corte di Cassazione will announce its decision on the matter of the legitimacy of the trial and the acquittals.

Will a new investigation uncover the truth?

In the meantime, a new investigation has been opened in order to finally ascertain whether — as suggested in the sentence of the first instance court and strongly reiterated in the motivations of the appeals court's decision — there is (also) a responsibility of the Carabinieri who arrested Stefano.

Three Carabinieri are indeed currently being investigated for perjury, after having been accused by two colleagues. According to the declarations of the two fellow Carabinieri —which were acquired in May and recently been made public — that night, in the Tor Vergata Carabinieri station, there were agitated conversations about a guy who had been badly beaten up by officers. "It is a mess, they massacred a guy," was indeed allegedly said by one of the three men under investigation.

The guy they are said to have "massacred" was Stefano Cucchi and these declarations — together with new expert analysis confirming the existence of a lumbar fracture on Cucchi's body — have re-opened a heated debate on the need to find out the truth about what happened.

His sister Ilaria has welcomed these developments and asserted that she won't have peace until justice will be done: "As I've said, it isn't over yet...this is only the beginning: the truth is coming out."

"Someone has finally started talking," rejoiced Susanna Marietti, Antigone's national coordinator. Don't leave Ilaria alone in her fight for justice — sign up the petition asking those who know what happened to speak up.