"My son was my everything," reports the 56-year-old woman from Bavaria with tears. Timo (23) was fun-loving and loved challenges. Six weeks before his death he was hired on a barge.

A shore leave in Dusseldorf was his undoing. Because a homeless person felt disturbed at his sleeping quarters, a dispute broke out. He killed the young bargee. The 56-year-old was sentenced to twelve years in prison for manslaughter by the Düsseldorf district court on Thursday.

Presiding judge Rainer Drees emphasized that the court had no doubts about the intent to kill the previously convicted man. In view of the brutality shown and the extent of the violence, twelve years in prison are appropriate.

Hit with a bollard

The 56-year-old repeatedly hit the 23-year-old, who was already unconscious on the ground, with a 14-kilogram cast-iron bollard.

The court agreed with the sentence of the prosecutor. The accused had previously made a confession. "He deeply regrets what he did and knows that he cannot undo anything. All he can do is apologize and ask for forgiveness from the family," says his defense attorney.

The lawyer for the parents of the dead man, who followed the descriptions in the process as joint plaintiffs, had even proposed a sentence of life imprisonment for murder. Timo's mother burst into tears again and again. Her husband sat next to her with a petrified expression.

According to the indictment, the 23-year-old had to die because the homeless person felt disturbed. There was an argument in which the later victim insulted him several times and called him an "asshole," the homeless man claimed in his confession.

No precise recollections of the course of events

However, he could no longer remember the exact sequence of events, he had his defense attorney explain. He has been in Germany for more than nine years, said the Croatian. "I lived in the car for six years and on the road for three years." He had bad experiences with it. Sometimes he was robbed in his sleep, sometimes strangers urinated on his sleeping place.

The 23-year-old victim comes from Karbach in the Main-Spessart district in Lower Franconia. As a crew member of an inland waterway vessel, he was on shore leave. He had - probably without knowing it - approached the sleeping quarters of the homeless person on the edge of Düsseldorf's old town.

The 23-year-old died from his severe injuries at the scene of the crime at Ratinger Tor. Due to construction work, bollards that were firmly anchored in the ground were usually loose. The angry homeless man had grabbed one of the bollards.

Two men from Gelsenkirchen reported that they had seen from the car how someone had been hit in the area of ​​the Ratinger Tor and had therefore stopped.

perpetrator was arrested

"I ran to the victim," says the 34-year-old craftsman. His 35-year-old friend had followed the fleeing homeless man and had alerted the police officers standing in front of the door of the old town police station to the crime. The homeless man was arrested.

A police officer testifies as another witness that after his arrest, the 56-year-old said: "I felt the need to kill." The court had scheduled five days of hearings for the trial, but reached its verdict after just a few hours.

The fact that the victim was slightly under the influence of alcohol with a blood alcohol content of just under 1.4 per thousand is considered to increase the punishment. As a result, it was only able to defend itself to a limited extent against the outburst of violence by the sober attacker. The verdict is not yet legally binding.

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