A 47-year-old nurse has to defend himself in court. He is accused of killing someone with dementia. The nurse is silent for the time being.
Cologne – A 47-year-old nurse has been on trial in Cologne since Tuesday for allegedly strangling a patient suffering from dementia. The German is charged with manslaughter.
The man is said to have killed the 79-year-old in April 2019 in the Wermelskirchen hospital in the Bergisches Land “deliberately and without justification”.
According to prosecutors, the old man had repeatedly left his bed that night in a confused state and was wrong about the ward. Each time he only let the nurse bring him back to his room under protest. There the patient is said to have urinated and rioted on the floor, among other things.
The public prosecutor assumes that the accused probably committed the act out of excessive demands. According to the indictment, the 47-year-old is said to have been the only nurse on night duty and was responsible for around 30 patients.
Before the indictment was read out in front of the regional court on Monday, photographers and film teams waited unsuccessfully to take pictures of the accused. Only when the chamber had entered the bench and asked the photo and TV journalists to leave the room did a man in the last row of the audience stand at the hand signal of a defense attorney, who a few seconds later took his seat in the dock.
The defense attorney stated that his client would initially defend himself in silence. When he was questioned by the police at the end of April 2019, the man denied having killed the 79-year-old, as a criminal investigation officer who was involved in the case testified in court. The officer also stated that he had considered the defendant’s testimony to be credible at the time. “I went out of this interrogation and did not see the suspicion as justified,” said the policeman on the witness stand.
The investigation was started after the autopsy of the body revealed an unnatural cause of death. The witness said there was no further evidence of a crime. The 47-year-old’s defense casts doubt on the correctness of the Cologne report. In doing so, she cites a counter-opinion from a forensic doctor from Hamburg, who is also participating in the process. dpa
