They had allowed themselves a very normal coffee break, during their shift in the Rebibbia metro station of line B. But what should have been a moment of relaxation risked turning into tragedy. A Union Security vigilante and an ATAC employee went to the usual bar-restaurant near the subway. In addition to the coffee, ordered at the counter they asked for water. Too bad the waiter poured caustic soda into their glasses.

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Ponte Mammolo, asks for water, they give him caustic soda: very serious vigilante

It happened on Sunday evening, around 20.40, in a room in via Tiburtina attached to a sports center. Claudio Salvatori, a 51-year-old security guard who works at the supervisory company of Lazio patron Claudio Lotito, was the first to drink. Thirsty for the summer heat, he took a good sip of what he believed to be cool water. At the same time, the Atac employee made the same mechanical gesture. Except that, sensing a strange smell coming from the glass, he just wet his lips and then spat out the liquid. The vigilantes, on the other hand, felt flames raging in his throat. He threw himself on the ground in pain and started screaming. Shortly thereafter, he apparently put back some ingested substance, which however had already corroded his throat and esophagus. «It was a scary scene – says a woman who was in the club at that moment – she was screaming like crazy because she was burning everything: ‘What did you make me drink?’ At that point I called the ambulance and the police, because the man was armed anyway, being a vigilantes. They closed the restaurant and sent us away. ‘ The victim was taken in code red to the Pertini hospital and then transferred to the Policlinico Umberto I. He is not in danger of life, but the acid ingested caused him serious damage to the esophagus.

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The investigations

The carabinieri of the Santa Maria del Soccorso station intervened on the spot. They identified the waiter who served them: it is a 22-year-old Italian boy, regularly hired. The family of the security guard filed a complaint against him on charges of very serious injury. The Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office will open an investigation and it is likely that culpable responsibilities will also extend to the restaurant owner. The “offending” bottle was also seized, the transparent liquid of which will be analyzed in the laboratory. From a first check, however, it is clear that it is caustic soda or muriatic acid. It is a normal bottle of water, without a label, which had been filled with the chemical used for cleaning and carelessly left near the counter, so much so that the bartender thinks it was water.

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There is a long list of similar episodes, which took place not only in Rome. On 26 April 2016, for example, Maurizio Tancredi, a mechanic who was 58 at the time, drank from a bottle he had just bought in a bar in the Tor Pignattara area, getting burned from the throat to the intestine. The alarm was caused by passers-by called by the mechanic who was agitated in desperate conditions on a bench. In early March 2018, a hot pizza chef from Cassino took a bottle from his fridge to quench his thirst while preparing pizzas. He believed it was water, but inside there was industrial acid (probably left over during bottling) that had burned his mouth and oral cavity. In excruciating pain he had been taken to the emergency room.