The 47-year-old man who has been detained for stabbing his one-and-a-half-year-old son at the Boomkroonpad in Drouwen, planned to kill the child. The man confessed to the police. The Public Prosecution Service (OM) accuses the man of attempted murder.
The intervention of two officers and a nurse, who happened to be in the forest, prevented a family drama, the OM said. This was revealed today during the first public hearing on this case.
The man drove his son in the car to the forest in Drouwen on Sunday morning, February 27. The man had wrapped a knife in a tea towel and took it with him in a bag. When he left, the man left a note on the door of his home in Gasselte.
The child’s mother read the note and alerted the police. She left for the forest with her father, the child’s grandfather. There they saw two officers put the father and child in a car and tried to calm the man down. Before the eyes of these officers, the father thrust the knife forcefully into the child’s chest.
The knife cut through a rib and caused an arterial hemorrhage. The officers overpowered the father, using an electric shock weapon. The nurse took care of the child. During the session this morning it became clear that the boy is doing well again.
“I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry,” the man cried from a screen in the courtroom, to the child’s mother. He was in contact with the judges via a video link and has been in a psychiatric ward of the Penitentiary Institution (PI) since his arrest. The man is still being examined by a psychiatrist and a psychologist. He also undergoes a personality test (into the emotional and social functioning of the man).
The next short introductory session is August 31. The substantive hearing of the case is scheduled for October 18.