No, the parents prefer not to see these silent recordings from a total of six surveillance cameras in and in front of the gaming room in an industrial area in Burghauser Neustadt. Not the background, the exchange of words between the young employee and the much older man down in the basement restaurant. Not how this agitated man then left the game library again that evening last July. And certainly not the act itself, not all the blood after the man had shot her son on the landing up towards the parking lot from about a meter away, the bullet going through the heart and lungs.
The man with the pistol, now 60 years old, is a defendant in the Traunstein district court. He also doesn’t want to look at the monitor that’s in the courtroom, turned away from the audience and only visible to those directly involved in the trial. Unlike the victim’s relatives, the accused must remain in the room. Later he won’t look at the dead man’s father either, when he’s on the witness stand and asks the questions that the criminal court must now clarify: “How were you able to do that? Why did you do that? He didn’t do anything to you!”
According to the indictment, the 32-year-old, together with a slightly younger friend, had primarily borrowed the car from the young casino employee, who at 29 today is not even half the age of the accused, who had been her partner for about three years at the time was. He is said to have seen her white Audi with two young men in it in the evening in the city – and then immediately got the pistol home plus 55 rounds of ammunition, eight cartridges in each of the two magazines, one in the gun and one in addition in the belted one fanny pack.
He is said to have confronted his partner in the gaming room and then met the two men who were just arriving on the stairs. A fist punch, a shove, a grab in the fanny pack and 13 seconds after the punch the first shot. The friend of the 32-year-old who was killed ran over the stairs, the parking lot and the neighboring meadow for his life, the further shots from the gun missed him. Instead, the accused is said to have shot the magazine empty on the tires of the white Audi and finally drove away in his own car.
The escape leads to neighboring Austria
He made it to neighboring Austria, but he still didn’t get very far. Austrian police discovered his BMW that night in a parking lot at a vantage point over the Inn and Salzach rivers, actually not directly on the suspected escape route to Kosovo, from where the man came to Germany in 1992 as a construction worker. Police officers searched the area from a helicopter with a thermal imaging camera, a police dog tracked the driver who had got out of the car and finally a special commando from Salzburg pulled the accused out of a kind of cave in the steep bank near the viewpoint without resistance. The gun was still in his waistband.
The police on both sides of the Salzach almost immediately had a mug shot and the license plate number of the getaway vehicle. In view of the video recordings, there is not much to dispute for the defendant, who is being led into the room in shackles. He doesn’t want to say anything at all, even the personal details come indirectly from the psychiatric expert. He told him that he hadn’t fired the other shots at the fleeing man, only in the air to chase him away. In addition, both in the report and in the indictment, the defense counsel has the opportunity to invoke an exceptional emotional situation for his client, the vague feeling of being somehow persecuted and threatened. The trial is ongoing and the verdict is expected on May 15th.