According to a psychiatric report, the man was not mentally competent at the time of the crime due to severe schizophrenia. He was therefore admitted to a forensic therapeutic center in accordance with Section 21 Paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code. The man agreed. The decision is legally binding.
The man’s mother ran out of her home covered in blood in the early morning of June 6, 2024 and went to a Workers’ Samaritan Association emergency vehicle that happened to be in front of it to seek help, saying “Please help me!” shouted. As it turned out, her son had knocked on her door at 6 a.m. and asked for the still sleepy woman’s cell phone. “I wanted to call my dad. I thought he had a project in Africa,” the 38-year-old revealed to a jury.
“It breaks my heart as a mother”
However, his father had died a few months earlier. When his mother pointed this out to him, “he freaked out,” said the prosecutor. The 38-year-old gave her countless punches to the head, face and upper body – “hard, but not targeted,” as he admitted to a jury. The mother suffered a fractured thoracic vertebra, a fractured nose and bruises and abrasions all over her body. “I was actually afraid that he would kill me. As a mother, it breaks my heart,” she said as a witness in the investigation.
After his arrest, the 38-year-old also confessed to having killed his then-missing dog – a French bulldog – at the end of May. He confirmed in court that he drowned the animal in a bucket of water: “Because I was paranoid that it was controlled by someone else.” The dog “often snapped while playing, so during the psychosis I thought it was the only solution.” He then “disposed of the carcass at the manure site.”
Dog thrown from balcony?
The man and his partner had only owned the bulldog for three months. The previous October, the 38-year-old had already been tried once in the Gray House for animal cruelty, but was acquitted in case of doubt. There was no clear evidence that he threw his then dog – also a French bulldog – off the balcony in June 2023. In this trial, in which the man’s mental illness was not yet an issue because it was not known to the law enforcement authorities, the man claimed that the dog had jumped over the balcony railing, which was only 1.1 meters high, into the depths without his intervention. This could not be refuted because there were no eyewitnesses. A neighbor only heard the animal yelp and then splash on the concrete floor.
As the psychiatric expert Siegfried Schranz now emphasized, this year’s criminal actions by the 38-year-old were the result of an “acute psychosis.” It is urgently necessary to place the man in a forensic therapeutic center and there is no possibility of conditional leniency for the measure. “Otherwise, serious injuries and even the killing of defenseless creatures could be expected again,” warned Schranz.
