Stabbed teacher discharged: 'Saved by a brave student'

Stabbed by her 13-year-old student who was 'confused, dragged and indoctrinated by social media', but saved by the 'immense courage of another pupil of mine, also 13 years old, who defended me by risking his own life and prevented the worst'. This was recounted by Chiara Mocchi, the French teacher who last Wednesday was stabbed shortly before the start of lessons by a young man now in a protected community because he cannot be charged, five days after the attack at Trescore Balneario middle school and on the day she was released from hospital.

Shortly before being discharged, from her bed at the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo, where she had been visited yesterday by Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara, the teacher dictated her thoughts to her lawyer, Angelo Lino Murtas, explaining that her screams after the first stab wound drew the other student. And so, as she tried to defend herself and fell to the ground wounded, the boy confronted his armed companion, kicking him and making him run away. 'He is undoubtedly a hero,' the lawyer commented, 'because he risked getting stabbed himself as well. I am intent on proposing him for a medal, because he deserves it."

Chiara Mocchi explained that she had suffered 'a very powerful haemorrhage, almost a litre and a half of blood lost in a short time' due to 'a slash that came within half a millimetre of her aorta' and that she remembered 'a scarf pressed against her neck, the trembling hands of those who helped me, and that numbness that was advancing rapidly as the light around me became shadow, and the shadow became goodbye'. A thank you to the people to whom 'I owe my life', she wrote, starting with the 118 helicopter rescue team that transferred her to the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo, where she is still hospitalised, 'professionals, but above all human beings that I will never forget', to them and to the Avis volunteers who donated the blood that saved her, with an appeal to all to donate. "There are thousands of anonymous people who offer a part of themselves without wanting anything in return. Gestures,' she noted, 'that seem small, but become huge when they save a life. It is the same spirit with which my father founded the Avis-Aido of Media Val Cavallina, when he perhaps did not imagine that one day that life would be his daughter's".

In an interview with written questions by Rai 1's programme Storie italiane, Mocchi went on to explain that he would tell his assailant to do 'an examination of conscience. Understand your mistakes and get on the right track'. With one conviction: 'within the school and at an institutional level,' he explained, 'there should be less blah blah, with the possibility of understanding at this stage that exploiting digital technology does not mean abandoning children and adolescents with a smart phone in their hands without any control, since they can find the most unthinkable pitfalls without any protection for themselves and others'.

It is precisely on social networks, where the 13-year-old boy posted his 'manifesto' and the video of the attack, and on his network contacts that investigators are focusing their investigations. As for the teacher, she wants to "return to teaching in that classroom and in that school, to my students" but first "I have to look at these wounds in body and soul," she concluded.