A 34-year-old who, according to the prosecution, killed his seriously ill grandmother at her request in Hamburg-Horn has been acquitted in a trial. According to an expert’s assessment, the drug addict was incapable of guilt due to an exceptional psychological situation, was the verdict of the St. Georg district court on Wednesday. In the trial, the defendant described his sad family history, which had been marked by drugs and loss for decades.
The public prosecutor had accused the defendant of killing on demand. According to the indictment, in July 2023 he administered six tablets of medication to his grandmother, who was seriously ill, at her express request, and injected a mixture containing heroin intravenously. The 72-year-old then died of an acute heroin overdose, as she and the defendant had intended.
The defendant reported in the trial that his parents and other relatives were also drug addicts. The mother died of addiction. “When I found my mother, she had been dead in the apartment for four weeks.” He grew up with his grandmother. She was his only support at the time of the crime; after breaking up with his ex-girlfriend, he moved in with her. At that point, he assumed that he would no longer be allowed to have contact with his children, said the father of four.
The defendant went on to say that the grandmother had been doing very poorly for a long time. She refused a nursing service. He didn’t want to take her to the hospital. In his opinion, the conditions there were terrible. “She wanted to be redeemed,” said the defendant.
The woman asked him to help her and he didn’t see any other way out, he said. She gave him money to buy heroin for her. The grandmother wrote a farewell letter and asked not to blame her grandson. “It was definitely the right thing for her,” the man said in the courtroom. He himself wanted to keep his grandmother.
The 34-year-old said he panicked after his grandmother’s death. The court was convinced that he then wanted to commit suicide with the help of heroin and pills, wrote farewell letters to his children and caused himself serious injuries. According to his own statements, he has no memory of these events. He survived and called emergency services.
The 34-year-old must remain in custody after his acquittal for another case. No information was given about the background.
