They had come to say goodbye to grandmother. After the funeral, on the way to the funeral service, Klaus and Sylvia S., Holger and Carolin K., Dorothea and Gernot P. were shot on January 24 of this year. Adrian S., 26, son, half-brother and nephew of the killed is suspected. He is said to have injured two other family members with gunshots.
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The crime happened in the small town of Rot am See in the Schwäbisch Hall district. A tranquil place in the northeast of Baden-Württemberg with less than 5500 inhabitants. More than a thousand people attended a funeral service at the local “Forum” before four of the six killed were buried in the Rot am See cemetery.
“He was cooperative”
The trial of Adrian S. begins on Monday at the Ellwangen district court. He is accused of murder in six cases and attempted murder twice. According to the prosecutor, he planned the act meticulously and in advance: he is said to have joined two rifle clubs to learn how to shoot, to acquire a gun possession card and to buy a pistol.
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After his grandmother’s funeral on 24 January, Adrian S. was said to have shot at his mother in the stairwell, who was still trying to get seriously injured to safety. Then he is said to have killed his father, his two half-siblings, an uncle and an aunt. After that, he is said to have shot his mother, who was still alive, who had fled to the kitchen, in the head. According to the indictment, he shot another aunt and another uncle, who survived. Overall, the shooter, who carried three magazines with ammunition, fired 30 shots with a nine millimeter caliber pistol.
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Adrian S. himself alarmed the police and was arrested at the scene. On the same day Adrian S. gave the police and the following day the investigative judge “comprehensive information on the matter”, says his defense lawyer Andreas Kugel. “He was cooperative.”
“Fainting, dismay, bewilderment”
Adrian S. is 26 years old, has no criminal record and, after the separation of his parents, lived with his mother in Lahr in the Black Forest, where he graduated from high school in 2012. He broke off his studies in physics. In search of orientation, he moved to his father in Rot am See in 2018, who ran the Deutscher Kaiser restaurant there, a favorite with bowling and football fans, near the small train station. The family was considered rooted in red on the lake.
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After the separation from his wife Sylvia, 56, Klaus S., 65, managed the restaurant with the help of his sister Dorothea, 62, and her husband Gernot, 69. Mayor Siegfried Gröner says that an estate administrator had been appointed about four weeks ago. Since the big funeral service in early February, a “certain calming down” has returned to the community. “Everything is going again,” says Gröner, “but a lot is different the way it was.” Time heals the wounds, but it remains “fainting, dismay and bewilderment”. There is still no answer to the question of why this happened.
Adrian S. will try to answer on Monday. According to his defense lawyer, the defendant will explain himself in court and will not leave it to his lawyers. “He is intelligent enough to provide information himself,” says Andreas Kugel. For those involved in the process, Adrian S. was a stranger whom they only knew from the file. “But it depends on the person,” says Kugel. Only if you heard Adrian S. speak yourself could you assess his credibility and the truth of his words.
What drove the shooter into action?
The allegations also include the history of the S. family. Did Adrian feel disadvantaged or marginalized? What role did his lack of professional perspective play? Was there family abuse? Was there a dispute over family wealth? All of these assumptions are in the room. The background is problematic, says attorney Kugel.
A psychiatric expert will sit in the hall and give his opinion at the end of the main hearing. Adrian S. spoke to him in detail, as Kugel says. The question of whether he is guilty will be a central topic of this procedure.
A few days ago, the lawyer visited his client again in prison. Kugel said it was “stable” and in “good condition”. Immediately after the fact, the young man was only “partially accessible”, but he had acted on him “clearly and in order”.
In the event of a conviction in the event of a six-fold murder, there is a high probability that the court could also determine the particular gravity of the guilt and preventive detention. That would mean that Adrian S. will not be free for many years.
The plaintiffs hope for that. The two children of the half-sister Carolin K. “witnessed this terrible killing, especially of their own mother,” as her lawyer Christina Glück says. The older of them, 15 years old, was put in the house of Adrian S. with the loaded and unarmed weapon and was also threatened. He just managed to escape and escape the attack. “He was brave and even capable of several extensive police interviews afterwards, he even drew a sketch with the location of the dead relatives on site that he saw,” says Glück.
The offense committed against him was stopped with the indictment according to Section 154 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, because it would no longer be relevant in view of the other alleged murder and serious bodily harm (against adults). “The secondary complaint does not understand that,” emphasizes Glück. The younger brother was also in front of the house with the killed mother. “He ran after he met his dying uncle. He also continued to experience the terrorist attack, at least acoustically, and thus the killing of the mother, grandmother, uncle and grandmother’s second husband, who was his grandfather for him.”
Co-plaintiff Glück speaks of the “terrorist attack by an individual”. The idea that Adrian S. could one day live again after the criminal trial, even if only in “partial freedom”, exceeded “the limit of the imaginable” for the survivors.
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