Bonn Regional Court trial Beuel woman threw mirror cabinet out the window
Bonn · She felt watched. By a mirror cabinet. So she threw it out of the window without further ado - in front of a young couple's car. A blink of an eye later - and this could have caused a fatal incident.
She felt watched. By a mirror cabinet. So she threw it out of the window without further ado - in front of a young couple's car. A blink of an eye later - and this could have caused a fatal incident. For weeks, a 40-year-old woman had barricaded herself in her Beuel apartment. She thought she had lost her apartment key and tried - as she had told the court in Bonn - to reach the caretaker so that he could free her. Day after day she wrote cries for help on the walls of her apartment, on doors and also on tiles with a felt-tip pen. Mostly in Arabic. In the end, she freed herself from her prison – with a strange act of violence. On June 22, 2018, she took a mirror cabinet that was supposedly watching her out of the bathroom and threw it onto Sankt Augustiner Straße. A young couple saw the piece of furniture landing directly in front of their car. A blink of an eye later - and this could have been a fatal incident. But the shock remained.
Court: Placement in clinic on probation
The Bonn Regional Court has now ordered the 40-year-old to be placed in a psychiatric clinic. However - and this is an unusual decision - on parole. The 3rd Grand Criminal Chamber is certain that the final admission of the former tour guide, who has been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia for ten years, can be prevented by a "milder means": with the help of regular injections and assisted living. The fact that the 40-year-old is "ticking normally" with medication was clearly visible to the chamber. "Quite calmly and peacefully" she had told of her delusional excursion. And also the reasons for it were mentioned. The new psychosis had happened solely because she had stopped taking the medicines. "I was terribly hungry from the pills and became fatter and fatter.“ The woman had increasingly lost touch with reality without noticing. The supposed imprisonment "was very real". Also the voice on the day of the crime, which told her that she had to cope with cleaning before dark and had brought her under stress. Or a fly she couldn't catch. "Of course I was sick," the woman commented on her behaviour at the time. The defendant knows that without medication she is "unrestrained and aggressive" and a danger to others. If she still does not comply with the probation conditions, she is threatened with admission to a closed psychiatric ward. And from this, the chamber warned, there would rarely be a comeback.
Original text: Ulrike Schödel Translation: Mareike Graepel
