Raul Maieru († 19) burned in the car in Wängi TG – now his parents are speaking
“His smile was his trademark”
Raul Maieru (†19) was in the middle of life, wanted to start an apprenticeship and start a family. Now the Italo-Swiss from Wil SG has died in a car accident. Because he fell asleep on the way home from the exit, as his father sadly tells Blick.
Alfredo Maieru (52) and his wife Stefania (52) are sitting at the table in their terraced house in Wil SG. They hold on tight, comfort each other in these difficult hours and look at two pictures of their son Raul († 19). “His laughter was his trademark,” says the father, sad but composed. “Now we’ll never see it again.”
Raul Maieru was the young man who was driving on the A1 motorway in the direction of St. Gallen shortly before 6.30 a.m. last Monday morning. The vehicle arrived in Wängi TG off the road, crashed into a power pole and caught fire. The fire brigade was on site quickly and was able to extinguish the full fire. But any help came too late for Raul.
“A world collapsed for us”
“We received a phone call from the police that morning,” says Alfredo Maieru. They were told that Raul might have been found dead at the scene of the accident. “Exactly such a message probably does not want to get parents,” said the father. Later it was clear: It was actually Raul Maieru. “For us, a world collapsed.”
His son ate breakfast with them last Saturday, according to Alfredo Maieru. “He told us that he was going to a concert later and would be staying with a colleague at the weekend,” says the father. “Then he said goodbye and left.”
Raul was out in Zurich
As always, he received messages from his son at the weekend. Alfredo Maieru: “I knew that he was going to eat something with colleagues in Zurich on Sunday evening and then go out.”
Early on Whit Monday, Raul drove a colleague to Winterthur ZH and then made his way home in the Kia. “He had received the car from his employer for the weekend because he had worked so well,” says the father. His son was doing an internship as an auto parts salesman, would have gone back to work on Tuesday and started his apprenticeship in August.
According to his father, Raul is “99.9 percent asleep”.
But this does not occur. “99.9 percent of the time he fell asleep on the freeway,” says his father. They got that from the police. No alcohol residue was found on his son. “Raul always proudly said that he would never drink alcohol if he was still driving.”
Driving too fast is also excluded. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong at the scene of the accident,” says Alfredo Maieru. In the end, Raul drove “unchecked into the concrete post”.
Soccer player and future firefighter
The memories remain. “Raul had such a good heart,” says Alfredo Maieru. Everyone could always have asked him for help and got it. His son also played for FC Bronschhofen. “He was a captain,” said the father proudly. And: “He wanted to be a fireman like me.”
For the future, Raul once wished for his own family. It doesn’t come to that either. The family couldn’t even say goodbye to him properly. “We could have seen him again,” says Alfred Maieru. “But after what happened to him, we decided that we wanted to remember him with his smile.”