Last Friday, January 12, a court trial began in Mannheim against two police officers who publicly beat a 47-year-old mentally ill man to death in the city center of Mannheim on May 2, 2022.
The initial situation was that 47-year-old Ante P., who suffered from mental illness in the form of paranoid schizophrenia and was therefore undergoing therapy at the nearby Central Institute for Mental Illness (ZI), left the institute and refused to return to the psychiatric ward. As his attending doctor feared that he might harm himself, he called the police to bring him back to the psychiatric ward. According to eyewitnesses, the two cops who arrived at Ante's home suddenly began to spray him in the face with pepper spray, at which point he tried to run away. However, they got hold of him at the market square and brought him to the ground with violence. While they were holding him down, one of the cops hit Ante several times on the head and face with full force. In doing so he used quartz gloves. They then continued to brutally push him to the ground. Ante then collapsed and was no longer responsive. A short time later he died in the university hospital.
The autopsy of his corpse determined the cause of death to be "positional and fixation-related respiratory obstruction with consecutive metabolic derailment in combination with suffocation due to bleeding in the upper respiratory tract". Or to put it simply: the beatings by the cops caused Ante to bleed, as a consequence blood entered his throat and pharynx and due to the prolonged brutal fixation Ante ultimately suffocated from his blood.
This is also what the two cops are accused of. On the one hand, the public prosecutor's office accuses them of restraining Ante during the restraint in such a way that his airways were blocked. On the other hand, they are also accused of unjustified use of force in the form of punches and pepper spray. Accordingly, the public prosecutor's office is accusing one of the cops involved of "assault causing death in the line of duty "and the other of "involuntary manslaughter by omission".
The defense of the killer cops questioned the entire charge right at the beginning of the trial. The cynical argument of the defense lawyer is, that the death was not caused by the cops. The man was seriously ill with a heart condition and the blood from his nose could not have caused his death by asphyxiation. And by pure bad luck, Ante died just at the moment when two cops kneeling on him hit him in the face and head with a weapon.
When the trial begins on Thursday at Mannheim District Court, there is a great interest in the case. A crowd stands in front of the entrance to the court building. Some are protesting, while others want to follow the trial critically. There are stricter admission controls. One reason for the great interest in the trial will be the protests that arose after Antes' murder. Immediately after Ante's death, the May 2nd Initiative was founded, which has been fighting for justice for Ante ever since. Immediately after the murder, a large and militant demonstration took place in Mannheim the following weekend, which has already been reported on here. During the demonstration, there were several attacks on the police and also on the police station where Ante's murderers are employed, which was greeted with loud cheers from people who passing by
As much as those in power always try to portray it in such cases, the murder of Ante was not an isolated incident and certainly not in Mannheim. Only eight days later, another person died there during a police operation. Once again, it was someone in a state of mental emergency. The person in question is said to have had a knife and threatened to harm himself with it. In order to prevent this, the present cops shot him. The person died shortly afterwards. According to the public prosecutor's autopsy report, however, he allegedly did not die from the police bullets, but from injuries he inflicted on himself with the knife at the time. The investigation was closed.
Initiative 2. Mai writes: "We believe that in the first case the investigation was only continued because the police version became untenable due to several cell phone videos and published witness statements. The second case was simply closed due to a lack of publicity."
Just a few weeks ago, another case made public headlines in which a man was shot dead by the cops on the street in the Schönau district of Mannheim. The man's name was Ertekin and he was also in an exceptional psychological situation at the time of his death. He was holding a knife in one hand, which the cops took as an opportunity to shoot him with four shots from a distance of several meters. Neighbors who witnessed this incident described the cops' action in the bourgeois press as a "real execution. This was also reported here.
So it is not normal that the offenders in cases like the case of Ante ,to be put on trial. We have a long list of examples where this is not the case. Cases such as those of Mehmet B, Qosay K and Giorgos Z come to mind. Or the case of Adel B, where the cops continue to attack people and protesters who publicly denounce this case as a police murder.
In Ante's case, an important factor is that the murder took place publicly in the middle of the city center and the police were seen and filmed live by numerous people. However, the main reason that a trial even took place was not just the attention that the numerous videos of the murder attracted on social media, but above all the determined fight against police violence and the demand for justice for the victims. Without this fight, it probably wouldn't even be this far. But the mere fact that the murdering cops are now on trial does not mean that there will be justice for Ante. What we can see very clearly from the example of the years-long, well-known trial following the murder of Oury Jalloh is that the state in its various institutions, both the police and the judiciary, is trying to protect its beating and murdering chain dogs by all means. So it remains to be seen whether the murders will actually be convicted in this case. The only possibility for this to happen is not to let up and to continue the fight with all determination for justice for Ante P.
