First Published: 8:21 AM PDT, May 6, 2021
High school friends Finnegan Elder, now 21, and Gabriel Natale Hjorth, now 20, were traveling through Europe in July 2019 when a drug deal gone wrong led to a plainclothes officer s killing.
Two American men have been sentenced to live in an Italian prison after being found guilty of murdering an Italian military police officer. Finnegan Elder, 21, and Gabriel Natale Hjorth, 20, both originally from San Francisco, California, were just teenagers at the time of the drug deal gone wrong.
Widow Rosa Maria Esilio, who was newly married to Deputy Brig. Mario Cerciello Rega before he was brutally slain on the streets of the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome, said following the conviction, “This has been a very long painful trial. It will never give me back Mario, it will not bring him back to life. It will not give back our life together,” the New York Times reported.