Man beaten down with timber – 18 years in prison

The victim – 44 years old at the time of the crime and a professional wage clerk – survived thanks to exceptionally fortunate circumstances. The defendant pleaded “not guilty” to the alleged attempted murder.

The guilty verdict was not only for attempted murder, but also for serious bodily harm. The accused was also committed to an institution for mentally abnormal offenders. The judgment is not final.

The last day of negotiations was difficult. A witness mixed up the date and traveled several hours late from Lower Austria to the trial. The hearing lasted into the evening hours.

The accused claimed from the outset that he had defended himself against an attack directed against him. He was “attacked directly”, picked up the squared timber from the ground and “hit him as he was moving. I didn’t want to aim at his head,” said the 41-year-old on the first day of the hearing in early November.

Student saw the scene, filmed perpetrators and took care of victims

However, he was incriminated by a completely uninvolved witness who happened to observe the scene on the way home after going out with her boyfriend. The student pursued the accused and his two companions and filmed them with her cell phone. Then she went back to the crime scene and took care of the critically injured. The 28-year-old testified in court that he was “hit in the head with full force.” She did not notice a previous attack on the accused.

The man’s partner contradicted this on the second day of the hearing on Friday. Her friend came home with the two companions after the incident and himself had a bloody wound on his head and nose and a black ear. Her partner told her that he was attacked by the men who brought the squared timber. When the wood fell to the ground, he grabbed it and claimed to have struck in defense.

The violent attack took place in the night of July 11, 2020 in Vienna-Simmering. The accused – according to the public prosecutor from youth connected to the punk scene and shaped by extreme left-wing ideas – was on his way to the Ernst Kirchweger House in the district of Favoriten, which was besieged by right-wingers at the time. According to their own statements, the three wanted to “clap fascists”. They were heavily intoxicated and paraded through the streets singing and bawling long after midnight. The pay clerk, who had just come home in a taxi and was about to go to his apartment, asked her about the volume and asked the group to turn it down.

Victim had to relearn how to eat and walk and lost his job

This initially resulted in a verbal argument that suddenly became violent, with the accused allegedly using squared timber that came from a construction site – a school across from the victim’s house was being renovated. The victim was already in the process of moving away, as the prosecutor emphasized. The accused inflicted “massive and life-threatening injuries on the man. If this had led to a cerebral hemorrhage or a pulmonary embolism, he would have died”. The wage clerk was in the hospital for weeks with several fractures to the skull and had to learn to eat and walk again. He gave up his job due to persistent concentration problems.

In the meantime, the now 46-year-old is doing better again – apart from the consequences of a cruciate ligament rupture, because he fell to the ground unconscious after the blow and also suffered a corresponding injury when he fell. The man had no memory of the act itself when he gave his testimony, but he rejected the accused’s assertion on the first day of the trial that the aggression had come from him as unfounded.

Even his previous lifestyle does not necessarily indicate that the accused acted in self-defense. He has no fewer than 17 prior convictions, most of them for racketeering and assault. He has been in prison several times. Because he did not want to be arrested again after the incident at issue, he went into hiding for a while.