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Candle and cuddly toy on the mailbox in front of house number 155: "I am very affected, incredibly affected"
Photo:
THILO SCHMUELGEN / REUTERS
Tim Kurzbach was only about ten minutes in the apartment where the five children were found.
Ten minutes that put the Solingen mayor so hard that he disappears in a police bus for a long time to collect himself.
When Kurzbach then steps in front of the microphones, he struggles for words.
"I'm very affected, incredibly affected," he says and takes a deep breath: "Especially when you're a father yourself."
He came to get an impression, to thank the officers for their professional work - "and to say a short prayer".
Kurzbach put a white candle on the blue mailbox in front of the house with the number 155.
It's a touching, helpless gesture.
Emergency vehicles, journalists and residents stand on Hasselstraße all afternoon.
Police spokesman Stefan Weiand repeats the little information that is known so far countless times: that the police were alerted at 1:45 p.m. and that five dead children were actually found in the apartment mentioned, between one and a half and eight years old, three girls and two boys.
That the 27-year-old mother, a German, threw herself in front of a train in Düsseldorf Central Station and survived.
Another son
And that there is another son, eleven years old, who is now "in a safe family environment".
The North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of the Interior confirmed to SPIEGEL that the mother had taken her oldest child to Düsseldorf.
The boy survived without physical injuries.
"Horrible", "incomprehensible", "terrible" - you hear these terms again and again in conversations on Hasselstrasse.
"Maybe you could have done something if you had noticed it beforehand," says Christian Alsweh.
He lives in the house directly across the street, and from his balcony on the ground floor he repeatedly gives short interviews to the television crews.
Three teenagers try to be cool.
They've been there all afternoon, that's for sure, they explain, with all the sirens and vehicles.
And they saw a policewoman who came out of the apartment, horrified and with tears in her eyes: "She was finished, she couldn't go on."
A few meters further stands a 13-year-old, let's call him Julius.
He also lives here in the settlement.
Yes, Julius says quietly, he knew some of the family's children.
"Two boys and a girl. One was playing outside yesterday."
He turns away.
"It was still outside yesterday," he says again.
Later Tim Kurzbach, the mayor, wrote on Facebook: "Today is a day of mourning for all of Solingen."
He asks all fellow citizens to put a candle in the window that evening in memory of the children who were killed.
A police spokeswoman confirmed that there is now contact with the children's father.
The investigators no longer want to give out any further information - for example about the cause of death of the children or the family environment - that evening.
However, one assumes a criminal act.
More details should only be given in a press conference scheduled for Friday afternoon.
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