Lörrach rampage

Crime scene at the Elisabethenkrankenhaus on September 20, 2010

The rampage in Lörrach took place on the evening of September 19, 2010 in the St. Elisabethen Hospital and its immediate vicinity in Lörrach , in southwest Germany on the Swiss border. The 41-year-old lawyer Sabine R. killed her husband, her son and a male nurse and was finally shot by the police. Eighteen people were injured, three of them seriously.

Sequence of events

On Sunday afternoon, the perpetrator's husband wanted to pick up their son again. The woman shot the man in her apartment and suffocated the five-year-old son. She then set fire to the apartment where the fire accelerators were deposited. Shortly before 6 p.m. there was a detonation that severely damaged the ground floor and set the building on fire.

The woman stepped out into the street armed with a knife and a small-caliber pistol and ran to the St. Elisabethen Hospital opposite. She shot around and seriously injured two passers-by. In the hospital, the woman killed a male nurse and shot the closed doors of various sickrooms and the arriving police officers. In the following exchange of fire, an officer was seriously injured and the woman was shot in the head. The nurse who was killed in the hospital had stab wounds and bullets in the head.

Lighter injuries to other people are the result of the explosion and fire.

background

In contrast to most rampages , this one was committed by a woman.

Relationship problems are assumed to be a possible motive. The couple lived separately since June 2010, the child lived with the father. In 2004/2005 the woman had short-term contact with a psychotherapist against the background of miscarriages in the St. Elisabethen Hospital and the subsequent pregnancy. The lawyer also had difficulties gaining a foothold professionally. She ran a law firm in the destroyed apartment.

The perpetrator was legally in possession of the murder weapon, a Walther type GSP sports pistol . About 300 rounds of ammunition were found on her. She had the required gun ownership card and was previously active as a sports shooter in a club. The long guns that were initially not found and were entered on the gun ownership card were seized. They were with a hunter in the Lörrach district , to whom they had been handed over for safe custody. The lawyer had intended to begin training as a hunter.

It can be assumed that the act was at least partially planned, as there were around 50 liters of nitro thinner as well as 10 to 20 liters of gasoline and several liters of alcohol on the lawyer's premises.

A letter found in the perpetrator's apartment leads to the suspicion that she may have applied for a job in the hospital administration in 2006, but was not employed.

According to the reconstruction of the events on September 19, 2010, it can be assumed that the intervention of the killed nurse prevented further acts. He had opposed the perpetrator and thereby delayed her for a substantial period of time. A short time later, the first police officers arrived.

Reactions

Since the act was carried out with a sports pistol , the discussion about the gun law was reopened. In addition to the question of which weapons should be approved for shooting at all, the possibility of separate storage of ammunition and weapons was mentioned again.

According to the German Rifle Federation, the gunman had already left the shooting club in 1996, but kept her gun. "This would no longer be possible today," said association spokesman Birger Tiemann of the dpa news agency. The law applicable today would at least have made the rampage much more difficult in the form in which it was carried out.