By Anne Losensky
An e-scooter driver is followed, caught up and stabbed by a cyclist in Schöneberg. The cyclist runs off, gets in a taxi, drives to the airport and flies away. The jury charge sounds like an old score settled bloodily in broad daylight. Or was everything completely different?
District Court, Room 501. That’s what the public prosecutor says: On October 2, 2022 at around 2 p.m., there was a dispute between two men in the backyard of a betting shop on Bülowstrasse. “Presumably because of several narcotics deals in recent months,” according to the indictment.
Yunus Öz. (35) flees with the e-scooter. Ismet O. (33) caught up with him on his bike in Zietenstrasse. A knife wound, blood spurts out of the left thigh. Yunus Öz. dies in the hospital. Ismet O. sits on the plane to Türkiye. He only comes back two months later.
“My grandfather paid for the return ticket,” he says. He was charged with manslaughter (“killed a person without being a murderer”).
His story goes like this: He only knew the “boy” from the street, had “never had anything to do with him, not even with drugs.” For some reason he was “angry” and took it out on him. Others arbitrated. He then ” rode his bike around” because he was always in so much pain, his head, his shoulder… We met again by chance.
The other threw a glass bottle and lost a knife. He picked up the knife when the other came running and then left: “I thought nothing bad happened to him.” By taxi to the airport (“had enough money in my pocket”), off to Turkey.
Not a word of regret. He does not answer questions from the dead man’s family.
Judgment on June 9th.