FIRST-LINE PRACTITIONERS

Greece

2008 - 2009

Greece

Identification of the Source

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Keywords

Bullying, Hate Crime, Racism, School shooting

Description

Before 2009: Some years before 2009, XX came along with his family (father, mother, grandparents and brother) from Abkhazia, Georgia. His father is working as a driver, thus he is constantly abroad working (especially in Germany) while his brother studies in the University if Crete. Since their arrival in Greece, XX has been reported to suffer from bullying and racism from his classmates.
2008: XX physically attacked one of his schoolmates in Rentis Lyceum and was expelled from school. He went to a Youth Advisory Station and was suggested to attend psychological treatment.
31.03.2009: XX created a social profile at myspace.com with the nickname Death_salvation and a photo with him holding a gun.
02.-09.04.2009: XX’ mood inside myspace escalates from pessimistic, depressed, disappointed to enraged. He uploads photos with guns, knives, bullets etc.
09.04.2009: XX posts on his page at myspace.com a tile of a hard rock song “Free your hate” (This song belons to the German industrial rock band KMFDM (Kein Mehrheit Fur Die Mitleid – No Mercy For the Majority), the apparent favorite of Columbine mass murderer Eric Harris and the Finnish school shooter Pekka-Erik Auvinen, who committed the mass shooting at Jokela School in the municipality of Tuusula, near Helsinki, in 2007.) and some time after he posts “You will all die” along with a prophetic suicidal note (“I have no reason to continue living. I am very egotistic to die and let you live. Before I die, I will deprive you of the most precious thing you have. I have no respect for human life. I spit directly in the face of your “dignity” and “honor” and all that you hold sacred. I have made up my mind and I won’t turn back. Whoever runs into me on the morning of April 10 will be an immediate target — there will be no discrimination as to age, sex, or origin of those I will murder, they are all trash to me. I will kill you because that’s what I like and I will see that I enjoy it as much as possible. To most of you, I may sound paranoid, a criminal or a murderer. You make a mistake [because] you are the mentally retarded impudent cowardly louses, who abuse under the cover of anonymity, the capacity of teacher, or the company of many. So far, I have received nothing but rejection and abuse from those around me. I return these to you with the promise that you will spend your last moments begging for your wretched and miserable lives — soon you will see that I am a man who keeps his promises. I am not obliged to give further explanation of my actions.I have known but only one person who has value as a human being and I thought I was in love with her. I feel bad that she rejected me and I hope that, with what I will do on Friday, she will change her opinion of me.”). Inside this note he underlined the rejection he has suffered from everyone including a girl that rejected his love interest towards her.
10.04.2009: At 08:30 a.m. about fifteen minutes after the beginning of the lessons, XX arrived at the building housing the vocational school OAED armed with two loaded handguns, which were modified replicas of sound pistols which have been converted into firearms and a hunting knife. Inside the building XX1 approached 18-year-old student XX2, who had arrived late to school, and shot him three times at the chest.
XX1 then turned to leave the school and was confronted by two workers from a nearby technical company who were alerted by the gunfire. They asked him what has happened, and he shot both of them at the legs, from a 150m distance. During the assault, the gunman has shot 15 bullets of the 83 he had in the guns, his pockets and his bag, before the assault.
The gunman then ran to a nearby park where he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Next to the perpetrator the police found two weapons, bullets, a knife and the same note (handwritten) that was posted some time before to his myspace profile. He was carried in a critical condition to the Nikaia General Hospital where he later died in the hospital.
The 18-year-old student Dimitris Kokkinis, who was shot three times in the chest, leg, and hand, was carried in a serious condition to the Nikaia General Hospital, where he undergone surgery to repair a perforated lung as well as wounds to his arm and leg. However, he managed to overcome his injuries and live. The two others had been slightly injured, the one in the hand and the other in the leg.

Type of Crime

School Shooting/Bullying – XX has been the first ever school shooter in Greek criminal history. He has not been legally accused as he committed suicide after his unlawful actions.
Legal Ground:
1. Greek Criminal Code
a. Article 299. Intentional homicide. 1. Anyone who intentionally killed another is punished by life imprisonment . 2. If the act was decided and performed in a boil of mental momentum, the sentence of temporary imprisonment is imposed.
b. Articles 309 and 310 referring to serious body harms that could eventually lead to death
c. Article 312 of bullying and cyberbullying
2. Law 2168/93 (Government Gazette 147 / Α93) Weapons, Ammunition, Explosives, etc. issues) and its amendment with Law3944/2011 (Government Gazette 67/A/5-4-2011)

Type of attack
Hate crime against human life, school shooting, with revenge as motive, as a result of continuous bullying and racism.

Modus Operandi

Technologies which helped in committing the crime and passing information:
- Easy access to modified firearms from the dark market
- Social Media profile page with alarming posts
- Access to, and influence of, cultural scripts online and offline

Technologies, which can help in preventing to commit the crime(s) (future reference):
- Mobile Social Media forensics and Web analysis of “red-alert” profiles as well as of individuals who have encountered antisocial/racist behaviour from their peers, etc.

People involved

Perpetrator
Name: XX
Age: 19
Nationality: Abkhazian (Georgia) but of Greek origin
Gender: Male
Residency: Agios Ioannis Renti
Employment Status: Student of Vocational School (School of Electrical Engineering)
Religion: N/A
Language: Greek and Russian

Victims:
One student named XX (male, 18 years old) and two construction workers of a nearby factory (XX, 47 years old and father of 2 children and another 30-years old of Greek nationality, with not known identity facts).

Criminal History

One year prior to the attack, the 19-year-old was placed under a psychologist's watch, as he had a serious episode in the Rentis Lyceum, where he was studying: He had grasped his classmate's neck badly. As the school teacher described, if the other children did not intervene, the incident might have been tragic. A few days later, XX was expelled to another school and had to go to a Youth Advisory Station. His parents pledged to go to a psychologist.
Generally, it has been reported that XX suffered of incredible bullying attacks to a degree that had disrupted his personality. His classmates in school presented a racist behavior towards him, due to the fact that he came from Georgia, thus they were bullying him for his nationality, way of speaking etc., abusing him not only verbally but also physically. The rumors reported even more extreme acts of violence that exceeded the limits of sexual harassment.

Influential and/or vulnerable Groups

This case is another case of bullying (either physical or online) which led the perpetrator to cause harm to other people and himself inside the school environment. Several criminological scientific researches outline specific risk factors for the occurrence of such behaviors, both for victimization and for delinquent, violent behavior, which apply also to this case.
The first condition for a school shooting to occur is an extreme social marginalization of the young person in the risk group, primarily via a perceived low status assigned to one in the school’s social hierarchy. The feeling of alienation accompanying the perceived factuality of one’s marginalization has much to do with the nature of adolescence, the formative time in people’s lives when one experiments with and forms one’s identity, develops relations and relationships and establishes to what groups one belongs. All these are processes that can result in becoming subjected to social exclusion according to the applicable status system(s).
XX1 came from a different social environment than the majority of his classmates: he was a child born during war conditions, followed by the uprooting of his family from Sochumi and his attempt to join the Greek reality. He experienced severe bullying by his classmates and he never felt accepted as an individual from the rest of the community, Due to his individual psychosocial vulnerability, which has the potential to increase the effect of the perceived social marginalization, he felt depressed, and suicidal. He was also a sensitive and lonely child, always dressed in black and keeping his head low, staying “under the radar” in the time period leading up to the shooting. Generally, perpetrators of such crimes do not usually reveal their situation, problems and/or plans, to the school, the authorities, the family or friends before it is too late. XX1 had shown some “informational clues” – beforehand (angry behavior, attack to one of his classmates, myspace), but they were unfortunately assessed as a perfectly normal ambivalent behavior of an ordinary adolescent.
In addition to that, the social background of the victim and his family also plays a key role in the emergence of violent or degrading behaviors. XX1’ family, who lived in a small apartment of a block of flats in Renti, faced financial problems. The father, despite his university education, was unable to find a job and worked as a driver of an international freight truck, which obliged him to be absent quite often from home. The mother, despite several years of family living in Greece, has not been able to learn Greek well and was unemployed. According to the neighbors, the family had never caused the slightest bustle in the neighborhood, however, XX1 felt as an “outcast” and rejected society and humankind at large. The fact that he had been rejected by a girl had been the critical event that escalated his anger and led him to his final decision.
One last condition is the availability of weapons, according to the Hellenic Police, XX1 lived in a neighborhood that provided easy access to the black gun market as well as to people that knew how to modify the pistols to firearms guns and sell them at a low cost.