According to testimony given in court, a billionaire restaurateur was fatally stabbed by her own grandson after she got worried about how much marijuana he was consuming.
Owner of the well-known Brighton eateries Donatello’s and Pinocchio’s, Sue Addis, 69, was assaulted by her 17-year-old grandson Pietro as she slept in the bath of her £1 million house.
He stabbed her fatally in the chest and neck at least 17 times with at least two knives in a vicious assault.
He reportedly dialed 999 and stated, “I’m phoning to surrender myself in,” according to testimony at Lewes Crown Court. A murder has occurred.
The entrepreneur was discovered by police laying in her blood-stained bath with deadly injuries to her neck and chest.
Pietro Addis, now 19 years old, is being tried for the murder of his grandmother despite confessing to killing her.
According to testimony given in court, Addis assaulted his grandma on January 7, 2021, during the third pandemic lockdown.
The boy came from a well-known family that owned a number of Italian restaurants in Brighton, the jury was told.
He was working at the family restaurant while a student at a catering college in Brighton with aspirations to become a chef.
Donatello’s and Pinocchio’s restaurants were initially introduced by Mrs. Addis, a well regarded member of the Brighton business community, in the 1970s.
All three of her sons, Leo, Stefano, and Mikele, worked at the resort’s most well-known eateries, which drew A-listers like Bill Nighy, Katie Price, Michelle Collins, and numerous Premiership football players.
The court was informed that Pietro had ADHD and had been given medication to treat the problem.
He had started frequently using cannabis and taking anti-depressants, in addition to the prescription medicine, and his behavior had become worse.
He started skipping college and often missed shifts at the family restaurant.
He reportedly smoked one or two cannabis joints every evening, three or four times a week, according to testimony given in court.
During Brighton’s incarceration, the adolescent had been living with his father, Leo, and his stepmother, but after a heated dispute, he walked out and began living with his grandma.
His father would flush the medications down the toilet since he thought the ADHD medication his kid had been administered was mostly to blame for his son’s issues.
Due to conflicts in the family, it was agreed in late December that the youngster would move in with his grandmother at her £1 million property in Withdean, Brighton, after a particularly heated altercation.
His grandma had expressed worry about his marijuana usage to pals Sue Eastman and Denise Taylor.
She also said in a letter to Dr. Daphne Keen, the psychologist who gave him an ADHD diagnosis in 2018, that her grandson was a habitual “weed smoker,” which coupled with his medication use had left him listless and lethargic.
She said, “He has paranoia, and instead of assisting him, we are all becoming frustrated with him.” He continues to insist that he needs his ADHD medication Elvanse to function, but now that he is also using marijuana, he has lost all sense of reason.
It takes effort to convince him to do anything since “he simply wants to sit in his room all day.”
In addition to consuming cannabis, Addis was taking the antidepressant Xanex.
George Cameron, a friend, saw a significant change in the adolescent in the months before the murder.
He said to the authorities that his buddy had been “negative and dejected,” and that he had also became quite paranoid.
Addis had been behaving erratically in the days before the alleged murder as well.
He had started knocking on his grandmother’s door in the middle of the night to tell her he loved her.
Pietro’s mother passed away when he was six years old, and the court was told that his parents broke up soon after he was born.
2019 summer was when Pietro started consuming marijuana.
Mr. Scamardella said, “It seems that Pietro was selling garments to support his cannabis habit.”
The prosecutor, Rossano Scamardella QC, said that at 4 pm on the day of her death, Mrs. Addis returned from her job at Donatello’s and started looking for care for her grandson online.
The Priory, Ticehurst, a private clinic/hospital for addiction and mental health treatment, was the subject of her investigation, he said.
She also performed a search for “Brighton to Ticehurst by automobile,” presumably to determine its distance. Although Mrs. Addis may not have actually inquired at the Priory, it seems that she was contemplating having her grandson undergo inpatient care at a specialized facility.
“What then transpired in the run-up to her death is unknown,” he said. In the moments before he fatally stabbed her as she lay in the bath, just the two of them—Mrs. Addis and Pietro—were there at the residence.
Addis called 999 after the incident and said there had been a murder.
He refused to explain when asked how it had occurred, but when asked how certain he was that his grandma was dead, he said, “100%,” to the police.
Pietro Addis is accused of killing his grandmother, Susan Addis, Mr. Scamardella said. She was murdered, he says. In support of his claim that he was experiencing paranoid psychosis at the time, which lessened his culpability for the murder, he entered a guilty plea to manslaughter.
As stated by the State, Pietro “bears total responsibility for the murder of his grandmother” and “suffered no such insanity at the time of the homicide.”
“The question in this case is whether Pietro was suffering from an abnormality of mental functioning that arises from a recognized medical condition at the time he killed his grandmother and it materially impaired his ability to understand the nature of his conduct and/or form a rational judgment and/or exercise self-control and that accounts for his act of killing his grandmother,” he said.
The teenager’s actions and demeanor in the months before Mrs. Addis’ death, according to him, “are likely to be proof of the consequences of using cannabis,” the jury will hear.
The corpse had 17 stab wounds, including two to the neck, four to the chest, five to the belly, four to the left arm, and two to the left leg, according to the results of the post-mortem examination.
The stab wounds to the neck and the two stab wounds to the chest resulted in death.
At the site, forensic investigators discovered three knives. The first was a large black-handled knife discovered next to a bathmat. The second weapon was a smaller black-handled knife that was discovered after Mrs. Addis’ corpse was pulled out of the bath. Ultimately, a third knife was discovered by the police hidden inside a garment retrieved from Pietro’s bedroom.
While having accepted manslaughter, Addis has disputed a murder allegation.
The trial goes on.
»Millionaire restaurant owner’s adolescent grandson’s murder trial continues«