Father strangled his nine-year-old son to death – now the trial begins

SOUTHERN TALE. On the last day of the Christmas holidays, the father strangled his nine-year-old son to death.

Today the boy’s parents meet in Södertälje district court.

The 46-year-old father sits motionless and looks down at the table.

– It feels like time has stopped for me, says the mother.

The district court gets to see pictures of the boy, who was only nine years old.

From the screens in the stiflingly warm courtroom, he smiles at us. A boy with brown bangs, glasses and a gap between his teeth.

The contrast to the autopsy reports that prosecutor Anna Lapinska reads out is uncanny.

The prosecutor tells about what started as an ordinary day. A Monday morning in January. The mother drinks her coffee in the kitchen, quietly so as not to wake her son.

Before she leaves, she asks her husband, who will be home babbling that day, to come in and lie down next to their nine-year-old son. Since an operation the previous year, the boy is afraid to sleep alone.

The father calls the police

A few hours later, just before 11 o’clock, the 46-year-old father calls the police.

He calmly and matter-of-factly tells us that he killed his son just over half an hour earlier, that the son has no pulse and that it is not worthwhile to perform CPR.

– If you say you have killed your son, then I think you should try to save him too. So then I want you to perform CPR, says the SOS alarm operator.

When the ambulance and police arrive at the apartment in Södertälje, the boy is cold and lifeless. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital.

In questioning, the father says that he decided that morning to hurt the boy. A thought that he had had for a while and now “it was time”.

He says he laid down next to his son, saw that he was sleeping peacefully, and then grabbed the boy’s neck with his arms and began to strangle him.

Played sports and played chess

The mother has her hair in a braid and is fighting back tears as she testifies.

She says that the police picked her up at work and drove her to the hospital. They said it was about her son, but not what had happened.

The mother thought the boy had met with an accident.

– I thought they might have been sledding, he used to wear a helmet, but he might have collided with a tree. In my world there was nothing else.

The mother describes a well-functioning and established life, two committed parents with a long-awaited and loved child. She describes her husband as an active father who took his son to sports activities and played chess with him.

The father began to feel ill

But after the summer, she noticed that the man changed, that he felt bad. He was occasionally tired and pessimistic and had difficulty sleeping.

She tried to give him support and encouraged him to seek help.

– He was withdrawn and sad. But sometimes he was happy and joked with us. It was mixed signals. So I thought that it will pass, that we will make it.

The boy’s mother says that her husband, for 20 years, has never shown any violent tendencies – not even raised his voice. She also never worried that he would hurt their son.

– It is easy for everyone to become experts in retrospect and interpret the situation, but how could I know, says the mother.

– I feel tricked. A thousand times.

“Some kind of psychosis”

– I got some kind of psychosis. I grabbed him around the neck and pressed hard for a quarter of an hour or longer, says the father in the district court.

He is wearing a white t-shirt with the county council logo and a gray cardigan. His voice is deep and he talks slowly and mechanically about how he took his son’s life.

The prosecutor asks why he strangled his son.

– I have no explanation for that even though so many months have passed. I don’t know myself.

In previous interviews with the father, it appears that he had been unwell for some time and had long had thoughts of harming himself, his wife and his son. He describes himself as “crazy”.

The father’s lawyer Philip Hedberg says that his client is not only ill, he is seriously ill.

A forensic psychiatric examination shows that the father suffers from a serious mental disorder and that there is a risk of relapse into serious crime.

The Swedish Forensic Medicine Agency also assesses that the man may need forensic psychiatric care.

The trial in Södertälje district court is expected to last three days.