Gathered outside the Justice building in Zakynthos, relatives and friends applaud and cheer “Bravo!”, “Alexis, we stand by you”, “We love you”, “Congratulations” as police helps a young man in handcuffs out of a car and takes him to prosecutor.
“I am proud of my brother,” his step-sister told local media. “We all know what kind of a person he is. We see all these people who support him. I don’t care whatever happens from now on.”
“He is a hero, he saves the society from a beast, because he was a beast,” another young girl says.
The 26-year-old faces murder charges after he reportedly confessed to have killed his father “because he systematically sexually abused me when I was a child” and “turned my life to hell.” The young man said also that his father was sexually abusing also his step-siblings, a 10-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, children from the father’s third marriage. His third wife had recently died of cancer and he was raising the two underage children alone.
The 70-year-old retired postman was found shot in his car near on the national road leading to the village of Volimes on the island of Zakynthos last Monday. From the very first moment police suspected that the murderer was somebody the dead man knew well and all evidence hinted to rage.
Neither he nor his mother attended the funeral of the murdered man the next day, what made local police more suspicious. He confessed the murder on Tuesday evening.
Many members of the small community of Volimes drove to the island’s capital on Friday and told media that they came in order to express support and solidarity with the young man. They all speak of a person with low profile who had recently returned to the island after spending several years in Athens. ” I knwo him since he was 12, he was always a sad boy.”
“There were three denouncements about child abuse in the family, when the children were younger,” the chairman of Children Charity NGO To Xamogelo toy Paidioy told local media imerazante.gr
“Authorities said they had the family was under supervision,” the charity chairman said complaining that judicial authorities should have skilled personnel for such cases.
According to latest information the father had turned the home into a ‘castle’ and was abusing the children but also the mother on permanent basis.
This is the second case of child abuse that shakes the Greek society. Also beginning of the week, authorities arrested the parents of four children aged 8, 14, 17 and 25, for having systematically sexually and physically abusing their children. The two boys of the family reportedly mental disabilities.
The children were living the hell on earth, one denouncement was made. However, authorities did not act as they had to, even last year when the daughter was hospitalized in a child hospital in Athens. Doctors and child-psychologists had apparently realized the girl was living in a dysfunctional family but was not sexually sexual abuse.
The case was revealed last when the girl was hospitalized beginning of the week with extreme bleeding.
The details of the torture the children suffered are shocking.
No lawyer on the island and the broader area, a total of 94 registered lawyers, accepted the parents’ defense, authorities had to appoint one.
The 47-year-old mother reported confessed the abuse, the 52-year-old father accepted only partial abuse of the 14-year-old daughter. The appointed lawyer of the mother said that she is of low IQ and was following her husband’s orders.
The father was working at the Psychiatric Hospital of Leros as simple worker.
The small community is shocked but it seems that to have been aware of the children abuse – but when authorities in Greece sleep… there is nothing much to be done.