Student goes berserk

Own mother (61) almost beaten to death

The 24-year-old victim in front of the jury in Vienna.

(Bild: Bartel Gerhard/Gerhard Bartel, Krone KREATIV)

A 24-year-old in Vienna beat his mother with a cast-iron armchair until it broke. A "mafia-like structure" in his head had ordered him to do this. "That is one of the most dangerous symptoms", the court psychiatrist recommended. Yet it was the mother who first encouraged her son to stop taking his medication.

"My client did everything that is normal for someone in their early 20s" - he went to school, trained as a sculptor and continued his education at university. Of course, he also experimented with alcohol and drugs, explained the 24-year-old's defense lawyer. And at some point, the young Viennese was no longer "normal".

Mother talked him out of medication
"I had been walking around psychotic for a year," he recalled to the jury in Vienna's regional court. He had been in treatment time and again and had also been given medication. "But I stopped taking them because my mother convinced me that they were unhealthy."

At first I wanted to strangle her. Then I took a stool. Then I saw blood.

24-jähriger Betroffener im Landesgericht Wien

And that ended fatally for the 61-year-old: on January 19, her own son tried to kill her. "I wanted to strangle her first. Then I took a chair. Then I saw blood." The 24-year-old hit his mother several times with a cast-iron chair, beating her almost to death. One of the chair legs even broke off. The result: a bruised skull, a laceration to the skull bone and numerous fractures to the face.

"Mafia-like structures in my head"
Voices had ordered him to do this, the victim told the presiding judge. "I was threatened by mafia structures in my head." A neighbor alerted the emergency services. "What would have happened if the police hadn't come?" asks Ms. Rat. "I'd rather not imagine that," replies the young Viennese man. 

Pathological mother-son relationship
Forensic psychiatrist Sigrun Roßmanith attests to a severe form of paranoid schizophrenia: "One of the most dangerous symptoms is hearing voices. The inner reality mixes with the outer reality and he can't escape it. That's the fatal thing." Added to this is a pathological mother-son relationship - "You can't imagine a more dangerous environment for a person with schizophrenia."

The fractured relationship with his mother was already the subject of a trial in the summer of 2022. At that time, the young Viennese man was on trial for criminal damage to property. He scratched a total of 55 cars out of anger at the 61-year-old. In his first trial, the then 22-year-old pleaded with the judge to expel his mother from the courtroom: "She is the volcano of my anger!"

Because the 24-year-old was not sane at the time of the attempted murder due to his illness, he was placed in a forensic therapy center.