Inmate goes to hospital for test, escapes from bathroom and flees: manhunt underway

Law enforcement engaged in the search for a 27-year-old inmate: he was in hospital for an X-ray but escaped through the bathroom window

The province of Caserta is at the center of an emergency that seems to have come out of a high-tension thriller. Denis Costel Strauneanu, 27 years old, detained in Carinola prison, managed to escape during a medical visit at the San Rocco hospital in Sessa Aurunca. The episode, which occurred today, Friday 6 September, has sparked a real manhunt.

As in an escape film worthy of films like Escape from Alcatraz or The Great EscapeStrauneanu took advantage of a moment of distraction to elude surveillance. Accompanied by the Penitentiary Police for a X-raymanaged to find an escape route through the bathroom window, covering his tracks and triggering a massive search operation in the area.

Denis Strauneanu, arrested in Rome in 2021, is no stranger to crime and his escape has cast further shadows on the already critical situation of Italian penitentiaries, especially those in Campania. It is not only the spectacular nature of the escape that has struck the collective imagination, but also the complaint of the Penitentiary Police union, the Uspp, which highlights the seriousness of the working conditions in which the agents operate.

Giuseppe Moretti and Ciro Auricchio, respectively president and regional secretary of the Uspp, have launched a warning that sounds like a cry of alarm:

“We have long been denouncing the extremely difficult conditions in which penitentiary police personnel operate throughout Italy, especially in Campania. Urgent intervention is necessary, also to verify the management by the Prison Authority”

In these hours, the police are combing the province of Caserta, with the aim of bringing the fugitive back to prison and putting an end to what risks becoming a new black page for the Italian penitentiary system. Meanwhile, the words of the Uspp point the finger at a management that they define as “short-sighted”, incapable of responding to the requests of a staff under pressure, forced to work in inadequate conditions.

Strauneanu’s escape, unfortunately, brings back into the spotlight the structural problems of a prison system now on the verge of collapse, where every crack can become an opening through which a prisoner can escape.