In court, a mother raged at her daughter’s murderer, calling him a cowardly fool who lacked courage and insisting he take responsibility for the pain he had inflicted.
The 39-year-old Luay Sako occasionally struck himself in the face and kept his head down while Celeste Manno’s mother read a statement to the Victorian Supreme Court on Monday.
In the wee hours of November 16, 2020, Sako broke into Aggie Di Mauro’s Melbourne home while she was asleep in a different room.
When Sako left the property, she heard it and hurried to the bedroom, where she discovered her daughter’s lifeless body.
“I tried so hard to bring my baby back,” she sobbed as she addressed the court.
“I slept for my daughter’s final two minutes and forty-nine seconds of life. It was too late for me to shield her.
Approximately eighteen months before to Manno’s murder, Sako started following and harassing her.
Although they had only worked together for a short while, he fell in love with her since she had been supportive of him when he was fired.
He began saturating her with Instagram messages, declaring his love for her and disregarding her pleas for him to stop.
He sent Manno more than 140 messages from various Instagram profiles over the course of a year, with the messages getting progressively cruder and demeaning.
Sako continued to contact her even after she went to the police and got an intervention order against him.
He asked why she would consider him as a threat, assuring Manno that he would never injure a soul.
However, on November 16, 2020, he murdered her a few hours after she shared her first-ever Instagram snap of her boyfriend.
Sako drove to her northeast Melbourne home, Mernda, climbed a fence into her property, and used a hammer to smash the window of her bedroom.
Before returning to his car and heading to the police station, he broke into Manno’s room while she was sleeping and stabbed her 23 times with a kitchen knife.
Di Mauro said that she was to fault for her daughter’s death, along with the police’s inaction.
She informed the judge, “The only person I hate more than you is myself.”
“Not only did he kill my sweetheart, but he did it in my presence.
“He destroyed my self-worth and any notion of being a good mum … he’s left me with a lifetime of self-loathing, guilt and remorse.”
Sako was called a coward, a beast, and a gutless wonder by Di Mauro when he refused to look at her throughout her statement.
Sako was also confronted by Manno’s brother Alessandro and father Tom, who said that Sako had wrecked every happy moment since Celeste had left.
“It has been a hell of a nightmare and it felt like it was never going to end,” Alessandro stated.
On Monday, Sako entered a guilty plea to the murder of Manno, although he maintained that he had stabbed her twice, not 23 times.
The 39-year-old, who is defending himself, stated that glass from the broken window was to blame for some of the injuries.
Paul Bedford, a forensic pathologist, said the court that Manno would have most likely sustained her injuries from a knife and that no glass was discovered inside her wounds. On Tuesday, the plea hearing will resume.
