The horror began on July 29, 2019, more than two years ago, when the Eritrean refugee Habte A. ran into an eight-year-old boy and his mother in front of an ICE train at Frankfurt Central Station.

The mother survived.

Your son dies.

In the fractions of a second in which this act was committed, no one could save the boy.

Katharina Iskandar

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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A cruel crime And as if the trial, which ended in August 2020 before the Frankfurt Regional Court, was not already barely bearable for the mother, the perpetrator was ultimately also regarded as incapable of guilt.

One expert testified that Habte A. suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

The verdict did not end with imprisonment, but with the perpetrator being placed in a psychiatric ward.

That was the deed of platform 7.

Sick or culpable?

And it was not the only one, nor the last, that has raised the question of how to deal with offenders who allegedly or actually kill because of a mental illness. The line between psychosis and premeditation seems narrower than ever. In the security authorities and in the judiciary, it is said that there are significantly more serious cases of violent criminals suffering from psychoses. However, one cannot really grasp the phenomenon.

A selection: In June 2020 a man attacked the chef of a Chinese restaurant in Frankfurt with a cleaver. The diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. In September 2020, a 38-year-old woman from Erlensee will have to answer for her mother who, according to the court, killed her mother with a shower rod and a knife. She previously discontinued her medication on her own initiative. In November 2020, a 50-year-old woman attacked her son with a knife in Frankfurt. She is diagnosed with severe psychosis. But these are by no means all cases.

In January of this year, a man, just released from psychiatry, attacked four people with a knife in the Frankfurt train station district.

One of the victims dies.

In March, a 25-year-old man from Schwalbach killed his sleeping acquaintance with 16 stab wounds.

He is later declared incompetent.

Finally, in October in Witzenhausen, North Hesse, a man goes to a group of schoolchildren.

An eight-year-old girl is killed and the driver is sent to a psychiatric hospital.

Mental illness taboo subject

A 39-year-old man is currently on trial in Frankfurt because, while driving a car at high speed in the Sachsenhausen district, he disregarded a red traffic light and killed two pedestrians.

After the fact, he claimed he heard "voices".

In the meantime, it has become known that he mainly had personal problems.

With a woman.

When does culpability begin - when does it end?

The boundaries seem to be so fluid that even courts sometimes have a hard time getting a proper picture of the accused.

They rely on experts, forensic psychiatrists, who are able to actually judge whether someone has psychosis or is just pretending to be mentally ill.

The system works.

But basically it is already too late by then.