Four men from Beverwijk, Heemskerk and The Hague stood before the judge today. On October 24, 2019, they will ‘talk’ around midnight with the tenant of a house in IJmuiden. He has to leave his house, they say. The resident ends up in the hospital with a broken jaw, bruised ribs and a concussion.
“It’s around midnight when I hear a rumbling outside,” the lawyer reads out the statement of the victim, who was absent himself. “I’m scared and just to be sure, dial 911 on my phone. I realize that I only locked the front door with the slide and I go downstairs to the front door.”
“At that moment, four men enter and I am immediately attacked and hit on the head with a fire extinguisher. While I am being kicked, mainly in the head and ribs, they shout at me to get away from the landlord.”
Son-in-law of the landlord
This much becomes clear in the courtroom today: there was a disagreement about the rent of a house in IJmuiden: four men aged between 20 and 35 came at night to seek redress and the victim ended up in hospital. A witness saw and heard some things happen.
The victim has recovered physically: after more than two months of recovery, there was no longer any permanent damage. He says he never returned to the house and now lives elsewhere. But everyone in the room has different opinions about exactly what happened on that evening in 2019.
‘Help’ against nuisance
The eldest of the suspects is the son-in-law of the landlord, that is also certain. He himself is not on trial: there is no evidence that he somehow gave the order to kick the tenant out of his house.
Perhaps the son-in-law started ‘helping’ him on his own initiative. The lease would have expired or expired, and the tenant would be a nuisance to others with noise. But when he was called about it that day, he did not answer his phone, says the son-in-law’s lawyer.
Not beaten, but things were packed together
“It sounds more like a book than what happened,” says the youngest (now 23) of the suspects when he is allowed to respond to the victim. He is the only one of the four who showed up. “If what he says is true, I feel sorry for him. I apologize for that.”
He does not want to say much about his co-suspects, but he does want to say about his own story: “When we entered, he (the tenant, ed) immediately came towards me. I pushed him away and did not kick or hit him. going to get his things together.”
That may be true: the victim thinks he was beaten up by ‘more than one person’: “Whether there were two or three, I don’t know.” And so today, each suspect with a different story puts the blame on the others.
OM: everyone is equally guilty
It makes little difference to the Public Prosecution Service: everyone is equally guilty, the public prosecutor believes. She demands a three-month suspended prison sentence for all suspects.
That could have been more, the public prosecutor explains. But it took far too long for the case to come to court, at more than three years.
The officer did not say anything else about the cause. According to Robbert Poort, lawyer for the youngest suspect, the case would first come before the police judge, but a different decision was made. After that, the case was ‘shelved for a while’ and ‘legal chatter’ caused even more delays. Finally, five lawyers’ agendas had to be compared to set a date for the case.
In the meantime, some suspects have spent up to almost a year in prison for other things. Now they are all training or working and both the Public Prosecution Service and the lawyers do not think a new prison sentence is appropriate. The judge will make a ruling on January 23 at a quarter to one.