Even the whimpering and crying of his baby should not have stopped an aggressive father: According to the prosecution, a man raged with extreme brutality and obviously without empathy in an apartment in Aschaffenburg. Again and again he grabs his boy and throws him with full force on the ground. Desperate mother can’t stop her frenzied partner. Only when a local resident noticed the tumult and rang the bell did the attacker, according to the investigation, let go of the defenseless child.
Around nine months later, the suspect is before the district court in Aschaffenburg – he is accused of attempted murder and severe abuse of those in charge. “The accused acted out of an insensitive attitude that disregarded the suffering of others,” says senior public prosecutor Jürgen Bundschuh. Again and again, the German is said to have lifted the baby up and thrown it on the ground with full force last October. “I’m finishing this today,” says the 34-year-old, according to the police, to the child’s mother when he is said to have tried to break the neck of the ten-month-old boy.
The accused listens attentively in the courtroom as a police officer describes the investigation results in detail. The suspect was listless and emotionless the day after the crime when he spoke to him. “There was no question about how the child was doing,” says the chief inspector. “The boy had multiple skull fractures on both sides,” the 44-year-old explains to the chamber. The defendant, who was sitting less than two meters away, followed the testimony with apparent interest, but without any obvious emotion. Long, well-groomed hair, black-rimmed glasses, decent jeans, a blue and white striped shirt – the 34-year-old is allowed to sit in the hall without handcuffs. According to the court, the German, who was born in Kenya, has three children with two wives, speaks German very well, is divorced, and is a trained nurse. Until the excess of violence last fall, he was not known to the police for child abuse. “We had no information about him on our computer,” says the chief inspector, although two youth welfare offices had already been active in the respective families after earlier incidents.
There was already a suspicion of child abuse at the time, but the police were not called after the nurse had attacked his first son in 2017 and his youngest child in July 2022. The 34-year-old did not comment on the allegations at the start of the process. Only after his arrest did he deny everything to the investigating judge, says the police officer. He later presented different versions of what happened last fall, completely different from the baby’s mother. “Reading from the crime scene was just difficult, there was relatively little,” reports the investigator. The public prosecutor assumes that the man wanted to punish the child’s mother because he did not find her upbringing authoritarian enough. “From his perspective, it was too spoiled,” says the police officer.
The couple would have argued about it constantly, as the chat logs of the cell phones showed. In addition, according to the indictment, the man was jealous of the boy, his screaming is said to have annoyed him. “These motives are despicable according to the general moral view and are at the lowest level, after the hostile attitude of the accused in relation to the child has in fact broke ground,” says senior public prosecutor Bundschuh. The victim, who weighed around twelve kilograms at the time, was in mortal danger after the attack. According to information from the senior public prosecutor, nothing can be said about permanent damage.
Like murder, attempted murder carries a life sentence. According to police crime statistics, the police in Bavaria registered 13 attempted murders of children under the age of six in 2022. In addition, the statistics show 488 offenses relating to the abuse of wards, 195 involving girls and boys under the age of six.