A man who in the mid-1990s killed the heir to the Italian fashion house Gucci was arrested on suspicion of shooting his own son on Tuesday before attempting to kill himself in the Italian province of Pisa, the police said.
Investigators were still trying to piece together what happened in the small town of Santa Maria a Monte, the province’s Carabinieri police said in a news release on Wednesday.
Both the man, Benedetto Ceraulo, and his son, Gaetano, were hospitalized, with the father under guard and in serious condition on Wednesday, officials said. The son was reported to be not in critical condition, but no specifics were given.
Officials said that they believed that the elder Mr. Ceraulo, who shot Maurizio Gucci, the fashion heir, in 1995, was set off on Tuesday by a seemingly small slight: He noticed a scratch on his car, they said, and flew into a fit of rage at his son.
He then grabbed a small caliber pistol and shot his son before trying to kill himself, officials said. The elder Mr. Ceraulo, who is in his 60s, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and possession of an illegal weapon.
The shooting took place almost exactly 30 years after Mr. Ceraulo fired the shots that killed Mr. Gucci — a crime that his ex-wife was convicted of ordering, and which was depicted in the 2021 film “House of Gucci.”
Mr. Gucci, who inherited 50 percent of the family business after the death of his father in 1983, had spent his own and the company’s income so quickly that he was forced to sell his shares to a Bahrain-based investment group, Investcorp, 10 years later.
In March 1995, he was shot four times outside his office in Milan — twice from behind, and twice in the face at short range — by a gunman with a pistol with a silencer, the police said at the time. He was 45.
For almost two years, few details emerged about his killing.
Then, the police arrested Mr. Gucci’s ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani, Mr. Ceraulo and others. A court found that Mr. Ceraulo had killed him on Ms. Reggiani’s orders.
Ms. Reggiani was convicted and sentenced in 1998 to 29 years in prison. She was released in 2014 after serving 16 years of her 29-year sentence. Mr. Ceraulo, who received a life sentence at the same time, was released from prison a few years ago.
The small town of Santa Maria a Monte, about 20 miles east of Pisa in northwest Italy, was “shocked” by the events of this week, Manuela Del Grande, the town’s mayor, said in an interview.
“Things like this don’t happen in our little city,” she said, adding that they did not even know that Mr. Ceraulo lived there.
