One of his friends decided to call the police himself, to prevent Alex from being lifted from his bed unexpectedly. “There they said: very annoying, we can’t do anything with it,” says Nadia (21), a friend of Alex who was also there. Then they called the local police officer they knew well. “We asked if he could come to us so we could explain that the story was sheer nonsense.”
Despite the friends’ attempts to neutralize the place, within 20 minutes a group of eight heavily armed police officers with four cars were standing in front of them. “We heard ‘hands up’ through a megaphone,” says Nadia. “We had a dog with us, who was tense and started barking. The police set up a weapon there. Then we knew: it’s serious.”
Alex and four friends, who were waiting for the police, had to turn around and lie on the floor. After being searched, the five explained the story. “The police believed it right away, because we called ourselves,” says Nadia. “We just never expected it to be such a chaos.”
‘Not funny’
The idea that he is portrayed online by people as the shooter who targeted Peter R. de Vries, Alex finds “not so funny”. “It’s not really nice if you are seen as a perpetrator, when you are not at all. Even my boss texted, but he quickly knew it wasn’t me.” Nadia is also quite shocked by what happened. “We have learned from this that we should not make these kinds of jokes.”
The police in Nieuwegein say that the story of Alex and Nadia is correct. The only thing they can’t confirm is whether the officers actually drew their guns. The police do not appreciate ‘the joke’ and point out that these kinds of cases are very burdensome for officers.
“This kind of joke is really not possible. After such an attack, we have to process a lot of information in a very short period of time, we really can’t handle this.” The police also request that images be always sent to the police and not shared in WhatsApp groups.
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