When little Leon died last year, everyone believed in the unfortunate chain of an attack. But months later, the police are convinced of a different course of events: in their opinion, the father killed the severely disabled boy.
At the end of August 2022, a strange criminal case shocked people in Tyrol. On August 28, around 4 a.m., a father is walking with his six-year-old son Leon in a buggy along the so-called Redford-Promenade in St. Johann. The time is unusual only at first glance. Because Leon suffers from the rare syngap syndrome and therefore regularly has insomnia.
At around 5:20 a.m., a walker found the father unconscious with a laceration to the head. The six-year-old's buggy is empty, the boy is found an hour later on a sandbank of the river Ache, he has drowned.
When the father regained consciousness, he reported that he had been knocked down with a bottle by strangers. Leon, who was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic defect years ago and who would therefore never have been able to speak, could have crawled out of the pram on his own after the attack on his father and fell into the water.
Since then, investigations have been carried out, but the unknown attacker could not be identified and certainly not caught. Now the investigators announce that Leon's father was arrested on suspicion of a crime. Based on the results of the investigation so far, the public prosecutor's office in Innsbruck assumes "there is an urgent suspicion of murder and the pretense of a crime." His defense attorney told the Austrian "Kronen-Zeitung": "He is accused of killing his son and throwing him into the river to put him out of his misery." His client denies that "vehemently". The accusation was "absurd" that he loved his son.
According to the defender, there is no evidence, only circumstantial evidence. His client is accused of having carried the bottle with which he was knocked down in the pram himself. The police relied on the video from a surveillance camera, which the investigators would use to identify the bottle lying in the buggy.
In addition, Leon's father, who comes from Hesse, is said to have thrown his mobile phone into a garbage can at the scene of the crime. The pedometer that was installed on the mobile phone was last saved two hours before the mobile phone was found. According to the defense attorney, however, there are results from the criminal police that his client "had the mobile phone on for half an hour and was therefore on the Internet". This indication therefore requires a technical check, explained Stanglechner.
An expert report regarding the father's injuries also raised doubts about the course of events described. The father's body temperature measured during first aid was too high for him to lie there for a long time. According to the defense attorney, no one has claimed that he was lying there for a long time, the defense attorney emphasizes.
The defender also considers the suspected motive to be unfounded. Leon's illness has improved over time. The parents "found many ways to deal with it - and they succeeded." They haven't felt as alone as they used to for a long time, the newspaper's defense attorney said. There was even hope for a cure for Syngap syndrome, which, due to a genetic defect, leads to developmental delays, epileptic seizures and motor impairments. "The parents stuck to that, that was what drove them and their optimism," said Stanglechner.
The family accompanied Leon's illness with a website and also raised donations for research there.
