Enlarge image
Defendant Torsten B. in the district court of Neubrandenburg: "I'm basically not a bad person.
I failed in that situation.«
Photo: Bernd Wüstneck / picture alliance dpa / dpa central image
She finds it difficult to walk, and sitting causes her visible pain.
The scars on her body are hidden by her clothing.
The 33-year-old speaks softly, haltingly, hesitantly.
She only remembers fragments of what happened in her apartment on October 11, 2021 shortly before 2:30 p.m.
Her psyche apparently erased the burning spirit on her body from her memory.
She remembers that Torsten B. was in her hallway.
She doesn't remember words.
Just because she was lying on the floor and he was over her.
She remembered clinging to the door frame and screaming for help.
"He tried to get me out of there." Then her mother appeared in the hallway.
Torsten B. pushed the then 69-year-old so hard that she fell.
The daughter seems to be able to hear her mother's screams.
She can't go on, her breathing is hectic.
The presiding judge interrupts the questioning and sends the witness out of the room to calm down.
After a few minutes, the young woman continued her testimony before the jury chamber of the Neubrandenburg district court.
He worked for the permanent criminal service
Stefanie E. is of delicate build, she wears glasses and braids and looks younger than she is.
She met the accused on a dating portal on the Internet.
They occasionally met for sex.
In March 2020, she discovered she was pregnant.
She thought someone else was the father, but a test showed he wasn't.
Torsten B. was the only man who was still an option.
Their daughter was born in November 2020.
It is now clear that the defendant is the father.
Torsten B., 56 years old, tall, worked for the Rostock Criminal Police Service until he was arrested.
The policeman is led into the courtroom every day of the trial in shackles.
He faces charges of assault and attempted murder.
He is said to have tried cruelly and with base motives to kill his sex partner.
According to the public prosecutor's office, he wanted to disguise his paternity so as not to have to pay child support
Torsten B. denies the attempted murder.
He admits that he hit his mother and daughter.
As he put it on the first day of the hearing, he just wanted to talk.
Then the women suddenly started screaming.
He couldn't stand the noise and struck.
To remove his footprints on the laminate, he spilled alcohol and set it on fire.
He found the spirit bottle in the hallway.
The fire was extinguished in a short time.
He could not explain Stefanie E.'s severe burn injuries.
burn marks and devastation
She no longer knows anything about beatings.
"I don't know what happened to me," she said in court on Tuesday.
It was only when she was in the hospital that she remembered.
Stefanie E. came to Berlin to a clinic specializing in the treatment of severe burn injuries.
The judge asks about the cleaning products that she uses to clean the apartment.
The witness has little to say about it.
'Denatured alcohol?' 'No.' 'Did you have anything like that in the apartment?' 'No.' 'You can rule that out?' 'Yes.' her photos of her hallway.
There are burn marks and devastation that indicate a fight.
A green spirit bottle lies on the floor, the cap is missing.
Tampered with the paternity test
In March 2020, she had written cryptic messages to the accused.
She wanted to tell him that she is pregnant.
She was afraid of his reaction, she says in court, so she only wrote in hints.
"I now have to bear the consequences," says one of her messages.
"Now I have the salad," she wrote in another.
The job center and youth welfare office would have asked for the child's father's data.
That's why she finally informed Torsten B. in August 2021 that she had given birth to a daughter and that he might be the father.
"He didn't react happily." They took a paternity test twice.
“Something went wrong the first time.” The laboratory was unable to evaluate the samples.
The accused does not want to be responsible for this.
He admits that he manipulated the second test.
Stefanie E. says that she was "stunned" when the test showed that he was not the father.
She then wanted to have paternity determined in court.
At the beginning of October 2021 he pushed for a meeting.
Allegedly because of strange spam messages that are said to have come from her cell phone number.
He told her that people were being threatened using their mobile phone numbers.
She didn't want to meet him.
"He said he'd sort it out his way." She didn't know what he meant by that.
»I saw my daughter being threatened«
The court had previously heard Stefanie E.'s mother on Tuesday.
Even the now 70-year-old can hardly remember that October afternoon.
"It's all gone somehow." She remembers that a man, "quite tall," was standing in the hallway.
“All I know is I saw my daughter being threatened.
All I know is that I kind of intervened.” She says, “I was trying to protect my daughter.
I don't know exactly what I did.«
She lost consciousness and only regained consciousness in the hospital.
A coroner spoke in court of significant facial injuries.
The mother's nose was broken, her forehead was clearly swollen, and her right eye was bloodshot.
The mother also had bruises on her shoulder, collarbone and forearm and an abrasion on her thigh.
The mother cannot remember any smoke that neighbors noticed.
Not because she gave the eleven-month-old baby to a neighbor so that it would not be further exposed to the smoke.
Then the accused speaks to the 70-year-old.
He says that he cannot explain what happened that day.
All he knew was that the situation had escalated "because the mood changed so abruptly."
He says: "I'm basically not a bad person.
I failed in that situation.
I wanted to solve a problem, that didn't work.«
He then blames her and her daughter for his "misconduct."
He speaks vaguely of "stress produced by the noise."
He had already said so in his statement.
He probably means the screams of the women, for which there was allegedly no reason.
Last week, the presiding judge played recordings of the screams in the hall.
By chance, a neighbor had recorded her recording a voice message for a friend.
Shrill women's screams sounded through the hall, they sounded like mortal fear, like unbearable pain.
Torsten B. says to the mother that he is "endlessly sorry" for his behavior.
He apologizes to her.
He doesn't mention his little daughter, her granddaughter, at all.
When he also wants to say a few words to Stefanie E., her lawyer doesn't allow it.
"My client doesn't want to hear it."
