FLORENCE, Italy (AP) – Friends and family of an American woman killed in her Florence apartment gathered Friday for a funeral and burial in her adopted Tuscan homeland as authorities prepared to present their case to a judge against the prime suspect in her slaying.
Friends carrying red, white and pink roses joined relatives of Ashley Olsen, 35, and her beloved beagle Scout for the funeral inside the Santo Spirito basilica. Olsen’s boyfriend, Federico Fiorentini, entered the basilica holding a bouquet of flowers and held Scout on his lap during the service.
Fiorentini, a local artist, discovered Olsen’s body Jan. 9 after he asked her landlord to let him into the apartment because he hadn’t heard from her in several days. Prosecutors say she was killed a day earlier by a Senegalese man she met at a disco, after a night of cocaine-use and sex followed by a fight.
The suspect, Cheik Tidiane Diaw, acknowledged to investigators that he had pushed Olsen twice to the ground after she pushed him in an attempt to get him to leave her apartment. But he said he never strangled her and left her alive on her bed, according to his lawyer, Antonio Voce.
In his funeral homily, Monsignor Giovanni Scanavino recalled Olsen’s youthful smile and called her death an “irreparable destruction.” But he also condemned her community for what he said was its failure to accompany her in friendship and help her resist the “deadly tangle of alcohol and drugs.”