Four lives dedicated to selflessness and service cut short in the helicopter crash in Bosnia

The profile picture of Laura Procacci on her Instagram page is actually a collage of two images: on one side, she is wearing a surgical mask; on the other, a helmet – illustrating two aspects of the life of the sergeant who died in Bosnia in helicopter crash in which she was travelling with Italian Red Cross Lieutenant Adriano Zecchillo, who would have turned 65 tomorrow, and Sergeants Simone Ruggia, aged 37, and Claudio Marchesi, aged 35, both stationed at the 1st Antares Regiment in Viterbo. Four different lives which, according to friends and acquaintances, were united by a desire to help others.

Laura was 32 years old. The eldest of three sisters, she had lived in Montegrosso and then in Canosa di Puglia, near Andria. At the age of eighteen, whilst in her fifth year of classical sixth form, she had taken part in Miss Italia, reaching the final stage. She would have liked to become a judge. Then she chose another way to help people. She graduated with a degree in Nursing and then enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at La Sapienza and was just one step away from graduating with a degree in Medicine.

During the Covid pandemic, she had started volunteering with the Misericordia di Canosa charity, which remembered her on social media as someone who was ‘always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone in need’. Last year, she joined the Red Cross Volunteer Corps and last July she received the Dea Ebe Award in recognition of her commitment. Hers was “a life steeped in volunteering and sound principles”, said the mayor of Andria, Giovanna Bruno. ‘Her wish was to serve her country,’ added Don Peppino Ruotolo, the parish priest of Canosa, who would like Laura to be remembered ‘for her generosity and her smile’.

Franco Adriano Zecchillo was also remembered for his generosity, as well as for his expertise as a perfusionist, a role in which he helped establish the cardiac surgery department at Legnano Hospital, where he worked from 1999 until 2022, when he retired. ‘He was a very decent person, a bit reserved. If you organised a dinner, he might not come, but if you asked him for something, he’d go out of his way to help,” said the director of the Cardiac Surgery Unit at ASST Ovest Milano, Germano Di Credico, who worked alongside him throughout that period.

A lecturer at the University of Insubria, Zecchillo had continued to work and volunteer with the Red Cross in ambulances and on helicopters after his retirement. He had joined the volunteer corps in 1984 and was a member of the III Mobilisation Centre in Milan, the city where he lived in the Gallaratese neighbourhood with his mother Mary, who learnt of his death – which occurred the day before his birthday and one month after the death of his brother Alberto Carmine – at his second home in Paratico, in the Brescia area.