Ionuţ Emil Todea, the young man from the village of Brădet in Bihor who caused the death of a 25-year-old resident, was sentenced definitively to 7 years in prison and will have to pay moral damages totaling 1.7 million lei to the victim’s parents and brother its.
The decision, which is final, was pronounced on Wednesday, by the Oradea Court of Appeal, in the case of a tragic incident that occurred at dawn on March 27, 2022, in the village of Brădet in the commune of Bunteşti. Ionuţ Emil Todea and his wife were coming from a disco. At the wheel was the young woman, who allegedly lost control of the direction and left the car in the scenery in the area of the Sudrigiu commune.
The last road
The victim, Mădălin Sas, was a passenger in another car, which was driving behind them. He was returning from a party with two friends and, seeing the accident, he asked the driver to take the two spouses in the car, who climbed into the back seat. On the way, Ionuţ Todea and his wife started to argue, and the young man slapped his wife across the face, at which point Mădălin and his friends intervened to calm the scandal. It was impossible, because Todea got even more angry. He started shouting and hitting the person next to him, which is why the driver stopped and asked the two spouses to get off.
The misfortune was that Mădălin also came down, who approached the bully. He wanted to calm him down, but he couldn’t, because he punched him in the face, at which point Mădălin fell and hit his head on the asphalt.
Although called immediately, the doctors could not do anything. The young man died, his death being caused by “cardio-respiratory failure following the cranio-facial trauma and the cranio-cerebral trauma with meningo-cerebral hemorrhage”, as the forensic doctors noted in the report cited by the prosecutors.
Gentleness for the criminal
Ionuţ Emil Todea was remanded in custody for beatings causing death, a measure that was changed to house arrest, after the prosecutors sent him to court, in April 2022.
In the first phase, last year, the Bihor Court sentenced the aggressor to 10 years in prison with execution and to the payment of moral damages of 1.7 million lei in favor of the parents and brother of his victim, but the sentence was reduced, on Wednesday, by the Court by Apel Oradea, on the grounds that the initial punishment, aimed at the maximum prescribed by law (12 years in prison, the minimum being 6 years), is excessive.
He threatened the police
The decision is surprising in the conditions in which the court admitted the fact that Todea was not at the first criminal act and escaped so far only with light punishments, without reconsidering his behavior.
Concretely, being a minor, he was subjected to daily assistance after he went out for a walk, without a driver’s license, behind the wheel of an unregistered car, and then, in 2019, as he also wrote Bihorwas definitively sentenced to 1 year and 9 months in prison, suspended sentence under supervision, for trafficking and consumption of high-risk drugs.
And that’s not all, because in the morning of March 27, 2022, the court ruling reveals, the man also committed other criminal acts, which were overlooked: in the first phase, he tried to convince his mother to declare that she she is the one who drove the car with which they had entered the ditch, and then, when the police questioned him, “he was recalcitrant, threatening that he would remember him 20 years from now, when he would give them beat”.
Minimum is OK
“The defendant’s violent behavior indicates his particular dangerousness as he proved not only that he is capable of expressing his authority through acts of physical violence, but also that he can take the life of a person in similar or even more mitigated circumstances”, the judges showed , so that they, too, decide to reduce his punishment to the minimum, sentencing him to 7 years in prison “proportional to the seriousness of the act and the dangerousness of the criminal”.
The Court of Appeal, instead, upheld the moral damages awarded by the Bihor Court and, as the decision is final, on Wednesday, shortly after the verdict was pronounced, Ionuţ Emil Todea was picked up from his home by a crew of the 10th Section of the Ștei Rural Police and was lodged at the Oradea Penitentiary, where he will serve his sentence.
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