The preliminary investigation did not give any indication of any behavior contrary to the road traffic regulations or any other road traffic rules and thus (gross) negligent action on the part of the named person, according to the notification from the Salzburg public prosecutor to the defender. The hiring took place in accordance with Section 190 Z 2 StPO because there was no actual reason for further prosecution. “He is very sorry for the incident. From a criminal point of view, however, the proceedings against my client were rightly discontinued because there was no breach of due diligence,” said the accused police officer’s attorney, attorney Kurt Jelinek, to the APA.
At the beginning of February, the report of the traffic accident expert was received. Expert Gerhard Kronreif Kronreif came to the following conclusion in his expertise: At the end of a left-hand bend on the earthy, partly grassy, leafy and uneven road, the moped had little grip. The driver fell as a result of driving too fast – around 30 to 35 km/h. The distance between the moped and the police bus is said to have been seven to eleven meters or 0.85 to 1.1 seconds. Since the footrest on the left side of the moped got caught in the ground, there would have been a significantly “greater delay in slipping”. This means that the two-wheeler came to a very abrupt standstill as a result of this getting caught in the ground.
According to Kronreif, it was a “rare circumstance”. Because even if the moped driver had braked hard, there would have been enough distance from the following police car to stop without colliding. An accident could only have been avoided if the policeman had taken the fall and the entanglement into account and kept a greater distance. An evasive maneuver was not possible because the two to two and a half meter wide dirt road was too narrow for it.
Bursch is said to have given himself a chase
The 15-year-old from Lungau is said to have been in a chase with the police at the time. When driving in Tamsweg, a patrol crew noticed an unlit moped with an unreadable license plate, which the police said was traveling far too fast. “As a result, the police officers tried to stop the driver by using blue lights and a siren,” says the police report. Nevertheless, he tried to evade the detention by fleeing.
The boy first drove in the direction of Lessach and then in the municipality of Göriach on a dirt road. There he fell. The driver of the patrol car, it was a VW bus in which two other officers were sitting, was unable to stop in time. Despite emergency braking and an evasive maneuver, he was unable to prevent the collision with the moped and its driver, the police said. The vehicle collided with the moped and the teenager. For him any help came too late.
The police officer’s defense assumes a fateful chain of unfortunate circumstances. According to the report, the distance between the police bus and the police bus was sufficient to “stop without a collision” behind the moped driver “with an immediate reaction”. Even if the driver had braked immediately, Jelinek had told the “Salzburger Nachrichten” after receiving the report.
Mother: “Officials could have reacted differently”
The mother of the deceased told the “Kronenzeitung” that the officials could have reacted differently. Because they knew the driver’s name, the pursuit could have been called off. “He would have received his punishment, the moped would have been taken and the matter would have been settled.” And victims’ lawyer Stefan Rieder said: “If the police hadn’t pursued this, the boy wouldn’t have driven so fast and wouldn’t have fallen.” Rieder identified breaches of due diligence in police work and even a certain “hunting instinct” among the officers: “The boy was hunted to death.”
The autopsy of the victim came to the conclusion that the moped and the driver were not knocked over by the police car. The moped driver fell and was run over by the patrol car, a police spokesman said. When asked about the general necessity of vehicle tracking by the police, he said: “A night drive is always at the discretion of the respective officer. He or she has to make a large number of considerations in a very short time – both from a traffic and criminal police point of view.”
Source: Nachrichten
