the empty phone, the friend’s alarm on Instagram-Corriere.it

The body of will arrive in Milan during the day Julia Ituma, the very young volleyball player found dead at dawn on Thursday after a fall from the sixth floor of the hotel where she was staying with her team, Igor Volley Novara. The coffin, diplomatic sources inform, was transferred early in the morning from the Institute of Forensic Medicine, where the autopsy took place yesterday, to Ataturk airport.

THE funerals are scheduled for Tuesday morning, in the church of San Filippo Neri in the Bovisasca district in Milan.

Julia’s death

Since last summer Julia Ituma, an 18-year-old promise of volleyball born in Milan to Nigerian parents, played for Igor Volley Novara after three years in Club Italia and various successes with the national youth teams. Wednesday the team in Istanbul where they play the second leg of the Champions League (lose 3-0 after winning 3-2 in the first leg and are eliminated). Ituma, who plays opposite, starts on the bench, enters the court in all three sets and scores 2 points. After the match, the team returns to the adjacent International Volley Hotel awaiting the return trip scheduled for early Thursday afternoon. At dawn, however, her body is found at the foot of the hotel by two employees attracted by a pair of apparently abandoned shoes.

The hours after the game and the hotel video

In the hours following the match Ituma was particularly shaken. The mother tells of a phone call in which they had discussed the match and the phone records subsequently acquired by the Turkish police tell of a long conversation with a boy from Novara who attends the same private high school of the Piedmontese city in which the player was registered.

The CCTV cameras of the hotel portray her around 10.30 pm walking back and forth through the corridor on the sixth floor where the whole team sleeps. She holds her cell phone in her hand, reads and sends several messages, sits down and remains curled up on the floor for several minutes, always with the phone in her hand. She then she gets up, does some stretching and goes back into the room. She l she finds her roommate, la Spanish central Lucia Varela Gomez. The two talk for a long time, until around 1.30, Varela Gomez falls asleep.

The fall

In the hours immediately following – the exact time of death will be ascertained from the autopsy – Ituma opens the window of the room, pulls it close and, in all probability, passes the balcony just over a meter high and lets himself fall from the sixth floor. The impact occurs with a canopy located just below the room.

A flight of about twenty meters, the gutter folded, no trace of blood on the ground, where the girl’s shoes end up. Environment at 5 some hotel employees find his lifeless body and immediately notify the team and club staff.

The roommate

The police immediately interrogate the roommate who says she didn’t notice anything: I was sleeping, I remember that Julia and I spoke until 1.30 then I fell asleep. The other teammates and the technical staff and managers present in Istanbul (the delegation led by general manager Enrico Marchioni) also speak with the police who also confiscates the cell phone of the player, opens an investigation file and orders the autopsy.

Friend’s message

In the early hours of Thursday morning, still unaware of what had happened, the boy from Novara with whom Julia had talked for a long time during the night, unable to get in touch with her anymore, wrote a few private messages on Instagram to some classmates Ituma team, the youngest. He says he’s worried and to help him resent her. The players who are recipients of the message read it when the tragedy has already taken place.

The farewell message

The mystery remains about the farewell message that Julia would have sent to some friends during the night, which was first reported by the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet. The Igor Novara club has denied that a farewell message was sent in any form to teammates, technical staff and management. Who did Julia write to that night?

The mom

In the meantime, notified by the Farnesina, the Ituma’s mom, Elizabeth, takes the first flight to Istanbul with her sister Susan. They arrive on site in the late morning and, after a first stop at the hotel, they go to the Italian consulate in the Turkish megalopolis to make their statements. Her mother will tell that she spoke to her daughter immediately after the game. In the early afternoon of Thursday the team and the whole delegation left for Italy, with the exception of the general manager Marchioni and the doctor Federica Malgrati who remain in Istanbul to give further support to the investigators and Ituma’s family. In the late afternoon on Friday, after the autopsy was performed, all the girl’s personal belongings were collected and the mother was allowed to say goodbye to her daughter, the general manager and the doctor of the club, Ituma’s mother and aunt, returned to Italy.

The empty cell phone

Julia’s mom tells a Republic that he received his daughter’s phone from the Turkish police without data: I switched it on, but there was nothing inside. Deleted sms, address book, and WhatsApp messages. Indeed, the WhatsApp app has also disappeared. The investigators certainly copied the content to understand who he spoke and chatted with before he died. But I want to know too, I have the right. Instead I find myself an empty phone.