Cop saves woman from suicide after domestic abuse

(ANSA) - ROME, AUG 24 - An Italian female Carabiniere saved the life of a 49-year-old woman who had threatened to kill herself by jumping off her balcony near Naples Tuesday night after the latest episode of domestic violence she had suffered.
    "Life is such a precious gift, don't waste it for a man who is humiliating you," the 30-year-old Sicilian cop, Sonia Cannistraci, told the would-be suicide on the ledge at San Giorgio a Cremano.
    Cannistraci said it had been a hard job persuading the woman not to end her life to put an end to the suffering her partner was subjecting her to.
    "She didn't even want to look at me," said Cannistraci.
    "She already had a leg over the rail but luckily I eventually managed to establish a contact, also visual, with her.
    "When I realized there was empathy between us I told her that life is a too-precious good to throw it away on a man who was just humiliating her.
    "That was when I understood that she had decided to listen to me and to desist".
    Cannistraci said "the hardest thing was to put myself on her wavelength and in tune with her suffering, she was totally gripped by rage and panic.
    "Luckily I managed to get her to listen to me and from that moment on my one goal was to make her understand that it wasn't worth it." Cannistraci said the woman had had a history of domestic abuse but had never summoned up the courage to report her partner.
    "Our message is that you must absolutely report abuse to end the ordeal," she said. (ANSA).