It all happened last July, when a niece and her partner came to visit the childless couple. The four drank and the defendant mixed a bottle of sparkling wine with rum with cola and a cigarette of marijuana.
However, after some time she felt sick and went to the bedroom. She locked herself there, took her husband’s legally owned automatic rifle from the safe, and fired as the desperate man tried to get into the bedroom and used an ax to break the glass paneling of the door. She did not hit the man from a distance of 1.5 meters.
“According to the file, the bullet went through the glass panel of the bedroom door and around the upper half of the victim’s body. Only thanks to circumstances independent of the defendant’s will, the victim was not intervened when the bullet got stuck in the wall of the living room,” prosecutor Lenka Faltusová read the indictment.
“I was scared, I don’t know what”
The woman told the court that she had no memory of locking herself in the bedroom and removing the gun from the locked safe. She doesn’t even remember shooting the man.
“It’s terrible, I don’t understand it. I only know that I was afraid, I don’t know what. I never dreamed that this could happen. I must have been raking, I was drunk, or both,” the defendant Iveta N testified in a moved voice.
Her defense attorney is upset that the act is classified as attempted murder throughout the investigation. “Gunshot residue was found on my client’s shorts and tank top. Undoubtedly, she had to shoot from her side and not at the chest, that’s where the gunshot residue would have to be,” said the defendant’s lawyer Roman Koutský. The questioning of a court expert in the field of ballistics will be crucial for him. “It could be an accidental shot,” said Koutský.
The defendant has no relation to weapons. She tried loading the aforementioned weapon, which she called a submachine gun in court, once. But when her husband bought it and showed it to his wife, charging was too difficult for her, she said.
Nevertheless, she finally managed to control the weapon and fire. She herself says she has a memory lapse of the incident and only remembers fragments. For example, she doesn’t even remember calling her sister-in-law and other nieces around one o’clock in the morning.
Alcohol, the woman’s state of health and the medication she is taking for her serious rheumatological disease played a significant role in the case.
The incident bonded us, the husband testified
“I blame myself for thinking we could have a smoke. I also blame myself for breaking the door with a big axe, I probably scared the woman, while I could have gone to the workshop for other adequate tools,” the defendant’s husband testified in court.
“Were you not afraid of your wife when you saw her with a weapon?” the chairman of the criminal panel, Jan Šlosar, asked the husband.
“I trusted my wife that she had no reason to shoot me, I was not afraid,” said the man, who is participating in the main trial and is not asking for compensation.
“It sounds strange, but that incident somehow bonded us. It’s stupid to say, but for 11 days we almost went to the toilet together. She was worried about me and I was worried about her,” said the husband.
For the attempted murder of a fifty-three-year-old woman, she faces ten to eighteen years in prison.
2024-02-12 14:09:00