A GERMAN teenager has been jailed for life without parole for massacring his entire family with the help of a school friend.
Together with a 20-year-old friend known as Frederick, Andreas H (19) shot dead his two sisters, AnneMarie and Ann-Christin, in their family home in Eislingen near Stuttgart last April.
Then the two went down to a local pub where they spent the evening with Andreas’s parents, Else and Hans-Jürgen, who later returned home and went to bed, unaware their daughters lay dead nearby.
The two men then let themselves into the family home and shot Andreas’s parents as they slept, firing 30 shots in all, using weapons they had stolen a year earlier from the local gun club.
Though Frederick is of legal age and claimed to have fired all the shots, he was given a 10-year juvenile sentence because he suffers from Asperger’s syndrome.
Initially the two men claimed to have discovered the lifeless bodies. Police reported finding a distraught Andreas when they arrived at the family home, but soon the trail of their investigation led back to the son and his friend as perpetrators.
The massacre of an apparently respectable family shocked Germany, but the trial has exposed beneath that veneer a dominant father who cheated on his wife and was violent towards his children.
Prosecutors suspect the killing was motivated by Andreas’s inheritance, but have no definite motive. “The trial still hasn’t answered the question of ‘why’ as I had wished,” said Arno Mild, fiance of AnneMarie.