By Axel Lier
Passers-by discovered the dead S-Bahn surfer on Sunday morning at the Rathaus Steglitz stop. But it was only five stations later that the body could be recovered. Why did this take so long?
At 5:57 a.m., witnesses saw the man lying on the roof of line S 1 and informed the Berlin police via the emergency call 110. The man from Düsseldorf (19) was in the back of the train. Apparently it was not possible for the passers-by to inform the train driver on the spot.
The Berlin police passed the information on to the control center of the responsible federal police.
Jens Schobranski, spokesman for the Federal Police for Berlin and Brandenburg, on the BZ: “We will pass the information on to the railway control center as soon as possible.” In the meantime, the S 1 train had long since left the Rathaus Steglitz station and continued towards Botanischer Garden, Lichterfelde West, Sundgauer Strasse and Zehlendorf.
The railway employees checked which train it could be that the witnesses had reported. Then the control center had to reach the train driver – and in such a case he cannot stop on the open line. Schobranski: “That’s always unfavorable, because the colleagues and rescue workers can’t get to the person without a lot of effort.”
In the end, the train in question did not get an exit signal at the Mexikoplatz station. “Unfortunately, processing the information, assigning it quickly and alerting the right person takes time. In this case it was about eleven minutes,” said the federal police officer.
It was no longer possible to save the man: the 19-year-old had suffered such serious head injuries that he had already died. Investigators suspect that his head hit an obstacle during his careless action.