Czech media ignores trial of 2013's most serious racially-motivated attack

At the end of January, the Regional Court in Ústí nad Labem reviewed last year’s most serious case of racially-motivated violence (according to the indictment). During the celebration of the opening of the spa in Teplice, a local recidivist stabbed a man to death and seriously injured several others with a hunting knife.  

Even though the defendant, according to expert witnesses, aimed his blows such as to strike his victims on or near key bodily organs necessary for life, he has not been charged with either attempted murder or murder, but with grievous bodily harm resulting in death. Several days prior to the start of the trial, news server Romea.cz reported that this significant event was about to take place.

Evidently solely thanks to that notice, a few local representatives of the media did attend the first day of the main hearing. However, most of them left the courtroom after the testimony by the defendant and his friend, who had started the whole conflict but was called to the trial in the position of a witness, not as a co-defendant.

Over the next three days of the main hearing, during which the victims and key eyewitnesses testified, not one journalist made it to the courtroom. This means that the print media has once again reported – and only in various regional editions, not in national ones –  the attacker’s version of what happened and has completely forgotten to report the view of the victims.

Television stations have not yet reported on the trial at all. Romea.cz has decided, therefore, to augment the Czech media’s reporting with this exclusive report from the courtroom.

The defendant, Stanislav S., told the court that he had been sitting that evening and drinking with his father and his common-law wife in the Slávie wine-bar in Teplice when a friend of his, Kamil Sokera, suddenly called him. Sokera, who was a security guard at a grilled sausage stand, said he had been "bombed" and that "they took something from him".

Fearing for his friend’s life, the defendant said he immediately left the wine-bar, met up with his friend, and that together they undertook a criminal manhunt for "Gypsies". The people they were looking for had calmly left the area to play pool in a nearby bar.

When the two angry men caught up with the group, who were having a good time on the street in front of the town hall, the defendant testified that the group attacked him and his friend for no reason, that they were significantly outnumbered, and that he had simply drawn his knife to defend himself. He never noticed himself stabbing anyone and believes the people involved caused their own stab wounds; when asked by a victim’s attorney whether he recognized the victim’s claim to compensation in the hundreds of thousands of crowns, he immediately nodded and said:  "I’ll pay it, but I don’t have any money."

During his testimony, Kamil Sokera, who was a security guard (not a salesman) at the sausage stand, put a lot of effort into concealing from the court what kind of work he actually performed at the stand. He claimed to have sometimes been given a little free beer or sausage by the business as a token of appreciation.  

Nevertheless, in his testimony he stated that someone had stolen a sausage from "him", that this had enraged him, and that it was why he had been assaulted. Later during the trial both an assistant to those working the stands and the owner of the stand himself confirmed that no sausages were ever stolen from anyone that evening, and that the sausage stand security guard never complained to them of any such incident, not even the next day; the owner of the sausages testified that he only learned of the alleged theft from the newspapers.

According to testimony made to the court, the security guard complained about the alleged thief out loud in front of a randomly passing group of people (some of whom he later attacked) and the group responded, telling him to leave them alone. When he would not stop collectively blaming them, he was punched in the face by a tall guy, fell to the ground, got back up, and stayed silent.  

The group did not flee, but calmly continued on their way through the town, while the man whose task it was to guard the stand then angrily called his friend to say he had been assaulted. When asked by the judge, Sokera refused to describe what result he had expected to get from his criminal manhunt, in which two people were going after a group of seven.

Sokera did confirm that it was he and his friend who ran after the seven-member group, not the other way around; according to his testimony during the preliminary hearing, when his friend pulled a knife on the unarmed people he wanted to stop him, but his efforts were in vain. That is the version of one side of this conflict.  

Efforts to attack versus efforts to de-escalate

The victims and other witnesses testified during the subsequent days of the trial. The members of the Czech-Romani group who were attacked were close to one another in age but were otherwise very different in terms of personality; they had gotten to know one another doing volunteer work, and on that fateful evening they met up in a bar to celebrate one of their girlfriend’s graduations – almost as if they wanted to prove that coexistence between different ethnic groups actually works flawlessly in Teplice.  

In a good mood, they left the bar on foot in two small groups to take a look at the spa festival. Unaware that anything might go wrong, they planned to continue their own celebration at another bar with a pool table. 

When they walked past a sausage stand, a man suddenly ran out and cursed at them as "Gypsies" for no reason. They paid no attention to him, as they did not want to argue with anyone and were just out to have a good time.

Some members of the group admitted that when "that guy" wouldn’t stop his invective, one of them hit him, not too hard, which apparently put an end to the incident. They calmly continued on their way, but when they were by the town hall – several hundreds of meters on – they heard two men loudly shouting behind them, one of whom was the guy from the stand.  

The group stopped walking and waited to see what would happen. A "white" member of the group, Tomáš J., who does not like brawls, walked forward ahead of his friends and told the two men to drop it, that nobody was interested in their problem.

Suddenly Stanislav S. pulled a knife and began lashing at Tomáš’s chest; Tomáš was lucky enough to get out of the way in time and ran back to his girlfriend, who was waiting for him at the back of the group. The others, under the impression that their friend was being assaulted and concerned that they themselves might be attacked, began shouting at the assailant, saying things like "What are you doing pulling a knife on us here?"

Sometimes it takes violence to disarm a maniac

All of the victims made the same claim to the court, namely, that the sole purpose of their further efforts had been to get the knife away from the maniac who was frantically attacking everyone around him. They stepped up their efforts when they determined that one of their friends, Ivan Jarka, was lying unconscious on the ground with two stab wounds in his body.  

Radek T., who suffered two knife slashes near his heart, described to the judge in detail how he had used his elbow to hit the defendant in the head from behind and how even that kind of blow had not overpowered their assailant. Young Robert G. openly discussed "going after" the defendant the moment he noticed that Ivan was dying, punching the defendant in the face with such force that he broke one of his own fingers. 

The defendant’s friend, Sokera, came away from the incident unscathed, even though it was he who had sparked the conflict that resulted in such raw violence. Sokera has not filed criminal charges against anyone, and in court he blamed himself indirectly more than once for dragging his friend into "something" that he now faces a long prison sentence for – "This should never have happened…!" 

For the time being it is unclear who it was that eventually used a stick to strike the defendant in the head, which laid him low and caused him to drop his knife and stop attacking everyone around him. The stick was never found. 

One victim whose kidney had been punctured from behind by the defendant told the court that even though he had been seriously injured, he had been "the first" to "jump at the [defendant’s] head". Once disarmed, the defendant did not suffer any serious injury; he suddenly got up and ran back to the wine-bar where his father was waiting for him. 

A poor calculation

What was remarkable was the claim of the defendant’s father that, when his son received the report about the alleged sausage theft and the "bomb" that had allegedly been delivered to the security guard, he said to his son:  "So, it’s already begun…". From this statement it follows that the son was prepared at the time to act as a sort of backup force to go help the stand owners should there be a need to protect the stands; the son, however, never made any such claim in court. 

While some random witnesses perceived the final phase of the conflict to be a drunken brawl (or even an attack by the Romani people against the "whites"), when the police determined what the overall course of the evening had been, they charged Stanislav S. with premeditated murder as per the third paragraph of the Criminal Code, for which he would have faced extraordinary sentencing; they did not, however, charge him with racial motivation. After further interrogating the witnesses, the state attorney reclassified the crime as racially-motivated grievous bodily harm resulting in death.

Lack of evidence for murder

Why did the state attorney reduce the charges? During the melée, none of the surviving victims either noticed or directly saw the defendant make his murderous assault on Ivan Jarka.

After he was injured, Jarka distanced himself from the melee, propped himself up against the wall of the town hall building for a moment, and then collapsed. From the circumstances of the case it is clear that Stanislav S. was the only person there who had a knife and used it. 

To prove the defendant’s intention to murder, there would have had to have been testimony to that effect by an expert medical witness – but the state attorney said their expert refuted such a conclusion. The victims were enormously lucky that a local plainclothes detective was randomly walking by at the time and noticed the conflict.

While the detective did not intervene in the conflict, he did provide first aid to the man whom he otherwise knew to be a "criminal party". The detective did not fear that any of the Romani people involved might attack him, and ultimately led police to the suspect after he saw Stanislav S. standing near the wine-bar in a state of total confusion, telling everyone he was calling the police because he believed he had been assaulted.

Another crucial part of the trial involved the testimony of the young "white" girl who had been celebrating her graduation with her friends. Gently and in an almost literary style, she gave the court a quiet description of the entire course of that evening, during which "her" Czech-Romani group had just wanted to enjoy their shared celebrations in peace, during which she herself had assaulted no one, but during which, out of the blue, she had become yet another victim of the defendant’s ultimately murderous attack. 

The mistaken notions of the drunken, self-appointed protectors of order

The entire plot, therefore, took place in three stages, with the second and third overlapping in time. The first stage was the misunderstanding at the stand, when the security guard felt so strongly threatened by what was a banal interruption to the celebrations.

A small-scale physical conflict followed, which enraged the drunken security guard to such a degree that he called another drunken friend for help. They set out on their criminal manhunt together, but it did not end up the way he had imagined. 

The security guard’s friend did not behave during the second stage of the evening as had allegedly been agreed, but frantically attacked a group of people who were not to blame for anything very serious (despite the defendant’s originally mistaken notions). The Roma perceived the behavior of Stanislav S. as absurd from the beginning, but initially perceived it as a racially-motivated assault by a "crazy guy on drugs", not as homicidal. 

They did their best to pacify him by taking away his dangerous weapon, a hunting knife. They used no weapons themselves, even though one of them had something on him that he might have used, but did not.  

The third phase of the conflict began when the assaulted group determined that one of their number had obviously fallen victim to what had become a murderous attack, at which point several of them threw themselves at the main assailant, disarmed him, and then lost interest in in him after he was motionless on the ground. Evidently the question of who attacked whom and when during this phase will never be solved. 

It has been proven that the defendant started the brawl, escalated it, and then engaged in an assault against more than one person that resulted in the murder of one of them. Only the court can decide whether his intention to kill has been proven.

After seeing four days of this trial, the assailant’s motivation remains dubious to me, as does the main cause of the enormous intensity of his attack. It probably was based on his belief that if two white men were to start a conflict with "Gypsies" who outnumbered them, the white men would get away with pleading that they had been the victims of a crime, while the others would be able to do nothing but complain.

However, when his victims resisted, he lost all inhibitions and began wildly stabbing everyone he could. Or wait – actually, of the seven members of the group, only Romani people were injured, so to be correct, he began wildly stabbing all of the Roma he could.

The judge has postponed the rest of the main hearing until 24 February, and the first-instance verdict will evidently be handed down before the end of February. Readers should note that this report has been written without access to the case files and is therefore just my subjective view of what happened in the courtroom.