It was a horrific picture that was presented to the investigators in January 2020: parents and son shot dead in their house in Starnberg. The court must now answer the question: What happened then?
Starnberg / Munich – Did a young man brutally shoot his friend and his parents? And what role does his friend, who was waiting in front of the family house in Starnberg, play?
A good one and a half years after the violent death of a family in Starnberg, Upper Bavaria, the triple murder trial against two suspects has begun.
The 21-year-old German main defendant and his Slovak friend, who was accused as an accomplice, did not want to comment on the horrific allegations at the start of the trial. According to the indictment, the 21-year-old is said to have shot the family in their house to get his friend’s illegal weapons. His alleged accomplice, a 19-year-old Slovak, is said to have driven him to the crime scene and picked him up again.
Investigators initially thought the offender was son
A police patrol discovered the bodies of the 60-year-old woman and her 64-year-old husband and son on January 12, 2020. The accused are said to have cleverly concealed their act – the investigators initially thought the son was the perpetrator.
But further investigations led to the now suspect 21-year-old, who was friends with the son and is said to have spent the evening with him. Like the dead young man, he is said to have been a gun fanatic and targeted his friend’s illegal weapons.
The defense of the 19-year-old co-defendant expressed massive doubts about the allegation and attacked the public prosecutor’s office in three opening statements. This follows “a simple logic” in their indictment, said lawyer Alexander Betz. “There are four people in a house, one comes out alive, and so the fourth is the murderer.”
But this is only one of the many conceivable variants. There are “several hypotheses of what could have happened on the night of January 10th to 11th, 2021 that are just as plausible, if not more plausible”.
Main defendant is silent on allegations
The prosecution “filled their gaps in knowledge with a lot of imagination instead of investigative work,” criticized attorney Alexander Stevens. There are many hypotheses about what might have happened in the property that evening. For example, he still considers the originally adopted variant of the son as the murderer of his parents to be possible. In any case, complicity on the part of his client cannot be proven.
The main defendant did not comment on the allegations, but detailed – and not free from drastic contradictions – on his personal circumstances. He described problems with alcohol, drugs – and his mother. He didn’t want to say how he got the money for the drugs. Nor did he answer many other questions – such as those about his friends or his sexual orientation. dpa
