A 64-year-old sports shooter has been standing before the Augsburg district court since Tuesday for the murder of three neighbors by targeted shots in the head. The background to the bloody act is said to have been years of neighborhood disputes in the apartment building in Langweid am Lech. The accused pensioner also has to answer for two counts of attempted murder. He is also said to have shot several times at relatives of a neighbor who was killed – they survived injured.
At the beginning of the trial, the 64-year-old German remained largely motionless as the prosecutor read out the charges. It is still unclear whether the man will comment on the allegations. The criminal chamber has scheduled the hearing for this Wednesday. Defense attorney Walter Rubach announced that he would then definitely make a short legal statement. The criminal chamber then wants to question detectives about the results of the investigation.
The sports shooter, who legally owned several firearms, is said to have virtually executed a 49 and 52 year old neighbor couple with shots in the head in the common stairwell. He is then said to have shot a 72-year-old neighbor through her apartment door. The woman had probably looked through the peephole because of the shots. The defendant is said to have speculated on this and also fired a shot into the woman’s skull just next to the spy.
According to the indictment, the killing of the three people took just 16 seconds. Since the cell phone of one of the victims happened to be making an audio recording during the crime, the investigators were able to accurately reconstruct what happened in the stairwell. The audio recording will be played later during the trial.
The public prosecutor reported that there were repeated arguments in the house with four apartments because of the defendant’s impulsive behavior. The sports shooter had lived on the first floor with his wife for 15 years. Three years later, married couples moved in next door, both of whom were killed in the bloody crime on July 28, 2023, and left behind an underage son. The third fatality was a 72-year-old on the ground floor who had lived there with her husband since mid-2020.
There are said to have been repeated arguments between the parties, for example over putting out the garbage cans or loud conversations on the terrace. Mutual insults were the result. Because of the trouble, police officers were often in the house.
One of the neighbors also filed a complaint against the 64-year-old on the day of the crime. When the officers came, the pensioner was not there. Later he is said to have picked up and loaded his pistol in order to ambush the neighboring couple in the stairwell as they returned from shopping. 15 days of trial are planned for the trial; the verdict could come on July 25th.