Italian police report calls ambulance driver Luca Spada a serial predator

A Carabinieri psychology unit has described Luca Spada, the 28-year-old former ambulance driver accused of killing six patients in the Forlì area by injecting air into them, as a serial predator who chose elderly and sick victims.

The report, by the investigative psychology section of the Carabinieri's RACIS unit in Rome, was cited in the prosecutor's opinion and in the decision of the judge for preliminary investigations who this summer rejected Spada's request to be released from prison, the Italian news agency ANSA reported on 8 September. Spada has denied the accusations.

One of the six deaths has reached a courtroom. Spada is due before the Corte d'Assise in Forlì on 15 October over the death of Deanna Mambelli, 85, who died on 25 November 2025 during an ambulance transport.

What the police report says

The Forlì prosecutor's office asked the Rome unit for a study of the 28-year-old's personality. Its authors concluded that he acted on what they describe as an obsessive, uncontrollable internal motivation, and that the choice of victims, elderly and sick people carried in ambulances, was compatible with what they call a predatory and serial pattern.

For the Carabinieri specialists, the traits typical of such offending include eliminatory motives sustained over time without repentance or second thoughts, well-linked actions and articulated planning, careful selection of victims and conscious decision-making, Sky TG24 reported.

Spada's own hospital admissions drew the specialists' attention. In one of them he is said to have caused himself an embolism. The report treats those episodes as part of a preparatory phase marked by persistent elaboration of the act, and as compatible with a form of experimentation, a testing and refining of the methods alleged against him.

On that reading, the cooling-off period in which a serial killer does not act would not be a pause in the plan but its continuation in less visible forms.

The report is a conclusion by police psychologists rather than a judicial finding, and it entered the case through the arguments over his detention.

Six deaths, one trial

Prosecutors accuse Spada of causing six deaths by introducing air into the venous systems of patients carried in ambulances. Their inquiry has looked not only at what happened on individual journeys but at whether one thread runs through the deaths. Checks on five of the cases are still under way.

In the prosecution's account, Mambelli died after a gas embolism caused by air entering her bloodstream abnormally, an event it treats as deliberate rather than natural. The case is proceeding by giudizio immediato, an accelerated route that removes the preliminary hearing and sends the file straight to the assize court.

Spada has rejected the accusations from the outset, and no verdict has been returned in any of the six cases. The number of deaths named in the investigation is not the number a court has been asked to rule on.

He worked as a driver and responder on ambulance runs for the Red Cross at Forlimpopoli until it dismissed him in May, a month after his arrest. Drivers in that role are not clinicians and were not permitted to administer drugs. The deaths being examined involve elderly and sick patients he is alleged to have attended while they were being moved by road.

Coffin photos in group chats

Between the end of 2024 and the start of 2025, Spada regularly shared macabre material in group chats he took part in, according to Sky TG24: selfies with coffins in the background, photographs of hearses, of exhumations and of crematorium furnaces, posted with joking comments. Colleagues told the Carabinieri in Forlì about the posts, which are now in the investigation file.

At the time of his arrest in April it emerged that Spada had been working with a funeral company in Meldola, without a formal employment contract. Investigators examined the connection while looking for a motive and then set it aside: none of the deaths listed in the case files was handled by the firm he dealt with.

A female colleague, questioned as a witness, told investigators he had a habit of posting the macabre content of that second occupation, in a particular tone.

One image from September 2024 shows Spada in the foreground with four coffins behind him, under the caption "ti accompagno io al Edmondo", a reference the reporting does not explain. Five months later he posted a photograph of more coffins with a line about a special offer.

Ragazzi offerta speciale! Sono arrivate e non so dove metterle, se trovate da venderla fate un fischio

In English, the February message reads: guys, special offer, they have arrived and I do not know where to put them, if you find someone to sell one to give me a shout. Another post from the same period showed a hearse outside a mortuary with an invitation to come along for a ride, and a picture of an open coffin carried the line that it was exhumation day.

Judge refused release in summer

Spada's defence asked during the summer for the 28-year-old to be moved from prison to house arrest, arguing that his dismissal by the Red Cross in May had removed the risk of his repeating conduct of the sort alleged against him.

Prosecutor Andrea Marchini argued the opposite, saying the RACIS report showed that the danger had not passed, Sky TG24 reported. The judge for preliminary investigations rejected the defence request and Spada stayed in prison, where he has been since April.

A custody ruling decides nothing about guilt. The request concerned where Spada would be held rather than the accusations themselves, and its refusal leaves him in prison until the first case reaches court.

Prosecutors have not set out the motive they will allege at trial. The judge who refused Spada's release noted the absence of an independent evidential value to any motive, and the Forlì investigation is continuing in order to reconstruct the individual episodes.

How the police specialists frame the pattern

For the RACIS specialists, the defining feature of the case is criminal conduct with a serial character. Their examination of the file found conduct repeated over time with common and recurring elements, they wrote, amounting to an identifiable operating scheme rather than isolated or merely occasional episodes.

In the wording Sky TG24 quoted, the report describes a behavioural pattern that repeats through analogous and coherent methods, and ties the alleged acts to a compulsion to repeat.

schema comportamentale che si ripete nel tempo attraverso modalità analoghe e funzionalmente coerenti

Spada remains in prison and denies the accusations. A defendant in Italy is presumed innocent until a final conviction. The first hearing falls on 15 October at the Corte d'Assise in Forlì, where the case will be argued over a single death, that of Deanna Mambelli.