15-month-old son strangled: 16 years in prison for mother in Krems – DiePresse.com

The 30-year-old confessed to killing her son in the Zwettl district in February. She was convicted of murder, the verdict is not final.

June 18, 2026 at 5:47 p.m

She is said to have strangled her 15-month-old son on February 18th in Groß Gerungs (Zwettl district), a 30-year-old was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Thursday at the Krems regional court. The guilty verdict for murder is not final. The woman pleaded guilty and said she had attempted suicide after the crime. The core issue in the trial was the question of sanity, which the jury ultimately affirmed.

All eight lay judges voted yes on the main question of murder. On the question of sanity, the result was 7:1.

The core issue in the trial was the question of sanity, which was affirmed by the court-appointed expert. Based on a private report, the defense attorney was of the opposite opinion. “Today we are dealing with one of the most terrible facts that can come across in criminal proceedings,” said the public prosecutor during her opening speech. The defendant did not act “in a delusion” on February 18th, but rather it was “a planned act” that had been prepared over weeks. The mother strangled the son during his afternoon nap, the prosecution stated.

According to earlier police reports, the dead toddler and the seriously injured 30-year-old were discovered by a relative. The woman was taken to hospital and arrested.

Regarding the crime itself, the defendant said several times on Thursday that she wanted to “protect” the boy from an environment in which the issues of alcohol and addiction played a major role. In this context, the surrounding circumstances and the relationship with the boy’s father were extensively examined in the jury trial. “We were both really happy about the child, it was a dream child,” said the 30-year-old.

However, after the first few weeks, her partner increasingly “let her down” and, from her point of view, revealed a serious alcohol problem. For the latter reason, she also contacted or visited the child protection center and the women’s advice center. In the end, she simply “didn’t have the strength” to move out of the shared apartment with her child, which was definitely something she was considering: “I was just so exhausted.”

According to a court-appointed psychiatric expert, the Austrian citizen, who had no criminal record, was sane at the time of the crime. “It’s a borderline case, it’s a difficult question,” said the expert on Thursday. There was a severe depressive condition that “got worse and worse” and culminated in the conviction that death was the only way out. Discretion and planning skills were impaired. But: “It wasn’t the case that any kind of control ability was abolished.”

When it came to the question of sanity, the defense lawyer argued, with reference to a private report, that the 30-year-old should be viewed as mentally incompetent. A request for evidence to read out this expertise was rejected by the court. The lawyer explained that his client was abused as a child by her own father, who was prone to heavy drinking, as a result of which the defendant’s personality structure was deformed early and permanently. The accused herself also spoke of “fragments of images that are there again and again”.

The defense attorney emphasized that therapy carried out around ten years ago was “much too late”. The birth of her son was “the greatest happiness of her life”, but then his client caught up with the past – also due to her partner’s alcohol consumption. “She has lost touch with reality” – the only visible way out for her was to “leave life” together with her son. A request by the defense attorney to exclude the public during the evidentiary process was rejected. (APA)