Children thrown from the balcony – mother was innocent
A 39-year-old mathematician throws her children off a balcony. The three-year-old daughter dies. The judge’s verdict: the woman was not guilty at the time of the crime.
3 Min.
Everyone involved in the Saarbrücken district court agrees: the 39-year-old, who threw her two daughters off a seven-meter-high parapet, which one did not survive, was not guilty.
© dpa
Saarbrucken. Everyone involved in the Saarbrücken district court agrees: the 39-year-old, who threw her two daughters off a seven-meter-high parapet, which one did not survive, was not guilty. Because of a mental illness, she cannot be held criminally responsible in the sense of a punishment.
In the security procedure on Friday, the chamber ordered the placement in a psychiatric hospital. The public prosecutor’s office had also requested this, and the defense had agreed. All ruled out a suspended sentence. According to the chief public prosecutor, the woman is currently a danger to the general public. The verdict is already final.
The deceased daughter was three, the other one year old. According to her own statements, the mathematician, who had worked as a management consultant in Frankfurt, suffered from a “mixture of depression and psychosis”. She couldn’t remember the act itself. Before the verdict was announced, she repeatedly apologized to all family members. “I’m just so sorry about what happened. I can’t believe how I was able to destroy the family.”
Mother also jumped off the balcony
In court, too, one is sometimes confronted with facts “that make one quite stunned,” said the presiding judge Andreas Lauer. Addressing the accused, he said: “If you don’t know what’s going on with you, you won’t notice from the outside that you are a seriously ill woman mentally.” An expert had found signs of schizophrenia and pronounced depressive symptoms in her, which had come to a head and resulted in an acute desire to commit suicide. The accused herself said that she did not want to leave her children behind alone.
The three-year-old daughter died at the end of July 2022 from a traumatic brain injury. Their one-year-old sister and mother, who jumped down herself, survived. The family lived in the Main-Taunus district in Hesse and had been visiting the grandparents in Saarbrücken.
Doctors advice ignored
According to the defense attorney, “a cruel, insidious illness” crept in on the mother at the end of 2021 – in a woman who was highly intelligent, integrated in the profession, lived in an intact environment and a great family and “overjoyed and proud mother of two healthy children”. The disease took complete possession of her, with the result that this “cruel deed” happened. She acted in a state of incapacity, but knew that the death of a child was irreparable. “I just ask at this point that you forgive this woman. I believe she deserves it,” he concluded.
Judge Lauer cautioned that if the woman had followed the advice of her doctors, continued to take her medication and stayed in a day clinic, the crime never would have happened at this point. However, it was already part of her illness that she did not see the need for it. Lauer appealed to the accused to listen to the doctors in the future. Since the effectiveness of the medication was found to be good for her, he saw “relatively timely chances” that she would be released again. (dpa)
Editor’s note: Due to the high rate of imitations, we usually do not report on the topic of suicide unless it receives special attention due to the circumstances. If you suffer from mood swings, depression or suicidal thoughts yourself or you know someone who suffers from them, you can get help from telephone counseling. You can reach them by phone on 0800 1110111 and 0800 1110222 or on the internet www.telefonseelsorge.de. The advice is anonymous and free of charge, calls are not noted on the telephone bill.
