When I heard about this incident for the first time, I was stunned. It wasn’t just the incident itself that shocked me. Hearing about a 24-year-old Greek student of veterinary medicine chasing and heroically killing with a rifle – filled with bullets used for killing wild boars – an Albanian burglar, it took me several years back to the benches of the Law School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where as a student for many years and as a “teacher”- research fellow Ι was often engaged in a similar conversation during the spring semester, stupidly certain that it was a particularly theoretical issue, the meaning of which in practice was almost exclusively worn out in the American films.
All theorists would agree that since the culprit was killed, while he was chased unarmed without carrying anything illicitly possessed, this lethal act would legally be considered as murder, with the attribute of mitigating circumstances of course for the offender, such as the most common of all “an advanced honest life”.
It would be hard for someone in the courtroom to imagine that after such an incident the local community as one, costituted by hundreds of citizens, would remain for hours outside the court and the DA’s office, in order to oppressively push the authorities to temporarily release the local hero (to their eye) – however legally a murderer – until his case is brought to trial by the “Joint Jury Court of Athens”.
It was already 2:50 a.m. when the fifth Paiania train left the terminal, namely when the inexperienced burglar attempted to enter the fifth in a row house (after four other failed attempts in the area and the police notification by the residents of these four houses). And it was almost 3.00 a.m. when the train whistled for the first and last time. It was at that time that the train carried one less passenger and the immigrant – though legal immigrant- father of four children, unemployed for the last two years and with a cancer suffering wife left with a shoot the train once and for all.
He was an immigrant indeed, but in normal circumstances this should not matter.