It is certainly not everyday to see an entire family sitting in the dock in the district court, and a well-off one at that, at least as far as professional careers are concerned. According to the public prosecutor’s office, however, the father, mother and two sons are said to have done something completely different: they are said to have insulted, pushed and injured a stand owner at the summer Tollwood in varying degrees of involvement and then had a fight with security and the police.
The thing is to deal with it BAP to say, “a long time ago”, more precisely, it was the Summer Tollwood 2022. The S. couple says they met in Cologne more than 30 years ago and attended a BAP concert. When the Kölsch rock band performed at the festival in Munich on June 30th, they wanted to go there on a family trip and also took their sons, who were 19 and 20 years old at the time, with them.
Whether the concert really went as harmoniously as the 57-year-old father, a lawyer by profession, says, that’s where the contradictions begin. The now 22-year-old son mentions that there was once a brief disagreement in the concert tent because he was saving a seat for his mother. But everything has been sorted out. A witness later claimed that he had heard that the family had been thrown out of the tent during the concert “because they were drunk and rioting.”
In any case, the S. family wanted to head towards the exit to the taxi rank when the father had an urgent need. The line at the toilet facility was the usual Tollwood length and the mother says she leaned against the neighboring leather goods stand because her feet hurt in her ankle boots. The stand owner asked her twice not to do this, then he filmed her with his cell phone.
For the 55-year-old, the starting point of the whole thing sounds completely different: someone grazed his goods with their fingernail and he asked them not to do that. The family then became “aggressive and abusive.” The leather goods seller is not light-skinned and the 22-year-old son is said to have called him a “monkey”. The student has already appeared before the police, and in the hearing the father explains that he said “monkey”. He often says “monkey”.
The stall owner goes on to say that he was grabbed by the shoulders and pushed. He somehow injured his eye and panicked. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the scuffle is said to have shifted towards a jewelry stand, where a painter and his wife were studying the display. “Suddenly there was a huge commotion and screaming,” he says. He wanted to protect himself from passers-by who had their backs to the action.
One of the young boys then poured the contents of his cocktail glass on him and threw the glass at him with full force. The second young man also threw the glass, but it flew in a high arc over the stand. The security operations manager was now on site. According to the prosecution, he tried to hold on to one of the sons. He is said to have resisted and insulted him and was finally brought to the ground. The son explains that the security man knelt on his neck. “I couldn’t breathe anymore,” says the 21-year-old. “It was like George Floyd,” the mother sobs, “I suffered trauma, Tollwood died for me.”
The father is said to have grabbed the security man by the neck, other stand owners intervened, more security came, a son is said to have been beaten and even the mother is said to have punched a security guard in the face. The police officers who rushed to the scene were also said to have been attacked.
The family’s statements sound completely different. Nobody wants to have thrown a glass; they were just cups anyway. Nobody wants to be beaten, on the contrary. They were brutally brought to the ground by security and injured in the process. The 21-year-old son says he filed a counter-report with the police about the knee on his neck.
The matter is also “a long time ago” for the witnesses. There are considerable contradictions in her statements and in the end the district judge orders that the proceedings against the male defendants be discontinued on payment of a fine, and in the case of the wife even without a payment of money. Niedecken’s BAP is on tour again this year. Presumably without the S family.