A 27-year-old father shot his toddle son dead with a rifle and he committed suspected suicide right afterwards in an apartment of Halandri suburb of North Athens on Sunday morning.
It was the noise of the shotguns that alerted neighbors who called the police.
Police officers managed to enter the apartment and get confronted with a macabre scenery: a body of a child and next to him the body of a man.
First estimation of police is that the father committed suicide after killing his 4-year-old son.
The man had stolen the rifle from a home in Gerakas, North Attica, in 2018, media report.
While the police investigates the motive of the crime, neighbors and relatives told police that the man was leaving separated from his 21-year-old wife, who he had married one and a half year ago.
The man was reportedly very jealous and he often accused his wife of having extramarital affairs. Arguments between his wife and him were often and very intense. Last contact between the couple was on Saturday night, when both fought via the telephone.
Saturday night and also Sunday morning, the child’s mother tried to contact the man but in vain, so she decided to go seek the man in the family. She might have been outside the home when the shooting took place.
The mother is in shock and police is waiting for her testimony in order to shed light into the motives of the tragedy.
“He was violent since he was a child, he used to beat his mother and sister,” an aunt of the father revealed to Greek media.
The man did not have a regular job but used to work only occasionally. Media suggest that it was his parents paying the rent for the apartment.
On Monday, media reported that the father had left a brief note saying, she [wife] shouldn’t have left them. “I can’t stand to be both mother and father. Big apologies,” he wrote
It is the second case in less than a month where a parent kills a child and commits suicide. In March, a mother threw her 4.5-year-old daughter from the balcony on the 5th floor of an apartments building in Neos Kosmos, Athens. The 44-year-old woman jumped right afterwards, following the death path of her daughter.
has the name of the man been publicly released at all?