The fatal stabbing incident in the detention center Veldzicht in Balkbrug hit the employees like a sledgehammer. “It is incomprehensible what happened,” says director Hanny van Geffen of the clinic. “We are all in enormous shock. We have never experienced anything like this before.”
A patient stabbed an employee to death on Saturday afternoon, injured two other staff members and then committed suicide.
According to Van Geffen, the perpetrator, who stayed in an open residential group, knocked on the door of the office where the three employees were around 1 pm. After the door was opened, he broke in and started stabbing at the staff members. One of them sustained fatal injuries. “Attempts have been made to resuscitate the employee, but to no avail,” said the director.
Wounded to hospital
The other two employees were also injured and taken to hospital. Van Geffen: “They are not in a life-threatening situation.” After the stabbing, the perpetrator locked himself in a separate room and tried to set fire there. The fire was quickly extinguished by the sprinklers. The perpetrator then took his own life in the same room with the knife with which he had attacked the employees.
Why the patient attacked the staff is under investigation. But according to Van Geffen, the attack was a complete surprise. Many staff and patients witnessed the incident. “Our attention is now mainly on them and the relatives. The impact is huge, we are all defeated. That’s how I found the clinic when I arrived this afternoon after I was informed about the stabbing incident.”
She would not say anything about the identity of the perpetrator and the attacked employees. The clinic, officially called the Center for Transcultural Psychiatry, houses, among other things, detainees with a psychiatric disorder. Many of them have a non-Dutch cultural background.