The crime shocked the country and opened the debate on coronavirus deniers
A 50-year-old German man has been sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for the murder of a gas station clerk whom he shot to death after his victim demanded that he put on a mask to serve him in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. The Court of Bad Kreuznach, in the western federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, stressed in its sentence that Mario N. committed a murder, as the prosecutors demanded. The defendant’s defense had requested a conviction for homicide with the extenuating circumstance of limited guilt, since the man was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the crime.
This occurred on September 18, 2021 at a gas station in the town of Idar-Oberstein and caused a great commotion in Germany at the time. During the process, which lasted for six months, the possible authorship of the crime did not play any role, since it was proven. The security cameras at the gas station accurately recorded all the events.
Mario N. confessed during the trial that, angry because the gas station attendant, the 20-year-old Alex W., did not want to sell him some beers until he put on the mandatory mask due to the coronavirus pandemic, he returned home , picked up a weapon there and returned an hour later to the place, where he shot his victim in the forehead, who died immediately. Mario N. lacked a weapons license for the revolver used to kill the clerk, so he was also convicted of that crime. After committing the crime, the convicted man fled, although he voluntarily surrendered to the police the next day.
Alex W.’s mother participated in the process with her lawyer as a private prosecution. The murder of the young man gave rise to a strong discussion in Germany about the radicalization of coronavirus deniers and the restrictions applied by the authorities to combat the epidemic.
During the process, Mario N., a computer scientist by profession, claimed to have suffered under the restrictions and regulations to combat Covid-19. His father committed suicide in early 2020 after becoming ill with cancer. Before he tried to kill the accused’s mother, she agonized for several months in a hospital before dying. The condemned man was unable to visit his hospitalized mother or attend his father’s funeral due to the pandemic. The man stated that he felt “treated like an idiot” when the young clerk reminded him of the obligation to wear a mask inside the gas station. When the judges read the sentence, the condemned man simply stared at the table, while his victim’s mother burst into tears and put her hand to her heart. “He acted in a treacherous manner and with low motives,” said the president of the court, Judge Claudia Büch-Schmitz, who stressed that the victim was completely defenseless and that the defendant brandished his weapon “consciously at the last moment” before firing. .
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