On the night of March 8 into March 9, 2014, in an apartment on Corso Bergamo in Chiuso, a district on the edge of Lecco in Lombardy, Edlira Copa killed her three daughters with a kitchen knife: Simona Dobrushi, thirteen, a promising volleyball player; Keisi, ten, who loved music; and Sidny, three. The two younger girls were killed in their sleep. Simona saw what was happening, tried to get away and was chased down. There were around ninety wounds in all. Copa laid the bodies on a bed and tried to kill herself with the same knife, and failed. When the police arrived she told them at once, "Sono stata io, le ho uccise io": it was me, I killed them.
She was thirty-seven, born in Albania in 1976. Dobrushi was her husband's name, and the Italian press used both. Her husband, Bashkim Dobrushi, had recently left her for another woman, and she had fallen into a severe depression that no one was treating. Don Franco Cecchin, a former Lecco parish priest who corresponded with her for years afterward, said she was already ill before the killings. "She was afraid she would not manage to raise the girls alone," he said, "and the killing, in her badly disturbed mind, was the only way out."
The preliminary-investigations judge, Paolo Salvatore, ordered a psychiatric examination about a month after the killings. It found that she had been unable to understand or will what she was doing, because of an acute paranoid psychosis sharpened by personal problems that predated the killings, although it had never been treated. Since the killings she had tried several times to take her own life.
The case was decided in chambers in an abbreviated procedure at the Lecco tribunal on May 19, 2015, with the prosecutor, Silvia Zannini, and her lawyer, Andrea Spreafico, present; Copa herself was absent, held at the judicial psychiatric hospital at Castiglione delle Stiviere. Judge Massimo Mercaldo acquitted her for total insanity, vizio totale di mente, and, finding her socially dangerous, imposed a security measure of ten years in a residence for security measures, known in Italy as a REMS. She stayed for the time being at Castiglione delle Stiviere. Italian law does not treat the verdict as a conviction.
In June 2019, a little over five years after the killings, she was granted semi-liberty and moved from Castiglione delle Stiviere to a supervised facility in the Lecco area, with permission to leave during the day. The decision made national news. Bashkim Dobrushi, who had since taken Italian citizenship and had a son with a new partner, told the Corriere della Sera he could not forgive her. "I don't want to know whether Edlira is in hell or in heaven," he said. "I don't care where she is, because that can never change my pain."
The three sisters have been remembered in Lecco at public ceremonies in the years since. What became of Copa after the ten-year security measure imposed in 2015 has not been reported.