Teenager charged

Lawyer to robber: “Finally give up your cell phone”

Defense lawyer Philipp Winkler with his young client.

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Anja Richter Martin Jöchl)

A gang of girls demanded the smartphone of a 13-year-old girl in a Vienna subway station - the members pulled out knives and pepper spray and also used their fists. Not the only act of the teenage girls.

Dressed up according to all the rules of TikTok art, eight girls turn up in Vienna's Landl district. Most of them are of school age, but are not in their classes. Two of the gang - a 16-year-old with a criminal record and a 14-year-old - are charged. The girls, who live in shared flats and are often absent, are said to have tried to rob a 13-year-old girl of her cell phone at the Handelskai subway station with a knife and pepper spray. When the victim fought back, they struck.

I wasn't Handelskai that day. It was Prater.

Jugendsprache im Gerichtssaal

Victim burnt with a cigarette
At another subway station, they pulled the cap off a boy's head. When he asked for it back, they burned him with a cigarette on his arm. "I wasn't Handelskai that day. I was in the Prater", said a witness who was incriminated by the 16-year-old who confessed. Articles and prepositions are generally omitted from the girls' sentences.

The hardest part of the trial seems to be that they are not allowed to use their cell phones. Lively voice messages were still being sent or listened to loudly outside the courtroom. "Put your cell phone away for once. Your life is at stake today," their defense lawyer Philipp Winkler also bursts out.

Conditional prison sentences
His client, who was accompanied to the trial by several social workers, got off lightly: 18 months conditional, not legally binding. She has already felt the effects of her imprisonment and was in custody for two weeks: "That really sticks with me. You don't forget something like that," she says to the presiding judge, who also has to intervene once when the friends start arguing loudly with the victim and her mother outside the courtroom. The 14-year-old receives a six-month conditional sentence for the cap action.

Tragically, her father, who has custody of her, is currently serving a longer sentence in Josefstadt prison.