display

Trier (dpa) - They put up candles, put down white and red roses.

Many pause in front of the growing sea of ​​lights in which little angels, teddy bears and posters mingle.

More and more people come the day after the rampage in Trier to the once Roman city gate Porta Nigra to commemorate the victims and their families.

“It's just bad,” says a mother with her five-year-old child who has just lit a white candle.

«My child asks me why?

And I can only say: You don't know. "

Dreadful.

Incomprehensible.

Awful.

These are the words that the people of Trier choose again and again for the event that changed their city on Tuesday: A gunman (51) drove his powerful off-road vehicle across the pedestrian zone and targeted people.

Five people died and 14 others were seriously injured, some of them life-threatening.

After the shock, the grief is enormous on Wednesday.

Above all, the fate of a hard-hit family drives people: A nine-week-old girl and her Greek father (45) were killed, mother and wife and their son (1) are injured in hospital.

“When you have a child yourself, you can understand what that means.

It's the worst that can happen, ”says Verena Becker (24) with her almost two-year-old son in the stroller.

display

She is crying, can hardly continue speaking.

"We actually wanted to go downtown on Tuesday, but it started raining and we stayed home."

There are also many candles on the main market, where the baby and father died.

"My son saw the fallen pram out of the window," says a woman from Trier.

“What's going on in a person who does something like that?” She says, shaking her head about the perpetrator.

"It leaves you speechless."

A group of schoolgirls are crying in each other's arms.

"She was one of our teachers," says a girl about the death of the 52-year-old, who died on Tuesday evening.

"We made a poster for them."

It is now at the place of mourning at the porta.

It reads “In memory” with the signatures of the students.

The fatalities also include a 73-year-old woman and a 25-year-old from Trier.

In a moving memorial event, the Mayor of Trier Wolfram Leibe (SPD) summed up: "Trier mourns, Trier suffers, but Trier does not give up."

One wants to show solidarity with the relatives, those affected.

Trier is a small city: "And that's why I am very sure that the grief we are all currently experiencing also consists of moving closer together."

In the afternoon he wanted to visit the injured in the hospital.

display

The Rhineland-Palatinate Prime Minister Malu Dreyer (SPD), who is at home in Trier, said when laying a wreath: «It's a sad day.

One night didn't help. "

Nobody could ever have imagined that something like this could happen in Trier - that a man turned his car into a weapon and murdered it at random.

“Whatever made him do it: nothing, really nothing at all can justify this brutal and terrible act,” she says.

You mourn with the relatives of the dead, pray for the injured.

"And at the same time I know for sure: Not a single word can alleviate the loss and suffering of the people who are affected."

In downtown Trier, where sirens and sirens sounded for hours on Tuesday, there is one thing above all on Wednesday: quiet.

Again and again people stand there devoutly lost in thought.

"December 1st changed Trier," says a woman from Trier.

Police Trier on Twitter