Coma girl’s sketch sparks hunt for driver

Schoolgirl Alice Cavrioli was found unconscious outside her apartment in Mantua, northern Italy, on May 3rd 2010.

Suffering from a fractured spine and head trauma, she spent five months in a coma and continued to be sedated with morphine while her recovery got underway, Corriere della Sera said.

Now more than three years later, Cavrioli has had a flashback and drawn a series of sketches of a car she believes hit her.

The drawings were taken by her lawyer to the local Lombardy prosecutor, who has now agreed to reopen the case.

The breakthrough was described as a “victory of determination” by Cavrioli’s mother, Monia Manerba. “Now we hope to identify who is responsible,” Manerba told Corriere.

The case had originally been closed as an attempt by Cavrioli to self-harm, as she was found with no shoes on below her apartment’s open window.

But the woman denies trying to commit suicide and says she cannot remember what happened. “It’s been a mystery,” she was quoted in the newspaper as saying. “I don’t want people to say that I threw myself out of the window.”

Her mother says Cavrioli, who is now wheelchair-bound despite five operations, was the victim of a hit-and-run and “never thought of suicide”.

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