The court ordered an inpatient measure for the man’s addiction treatment. He started one of these two years ago in a center for measures. According to the reports, the presiding judge said at the opening of the verdict that he was capable, willing and in need of treatment. The suspect had been addicted to drugs for years. Ruben K.* has been in custody since the night of the crime.
At the end of December 2014, the son of a wealthy gallery owner brutally killed his good friend Alex Faber († 23) in his parents’ apartment in Küsnacht on Zurich’s Gold Coast. K. hit Faber on the head with a heavy candlestick and rammed a candle down the victim’s neck.
Both had previously used drugs. About two months earlier he had raped his then-girlfriend in a London hotel.
In the seven and a half years since the crime, all court instances have commented on it. The fourth decision is now available. The focus was on the question of the culpability of Germans in the homicide. The defense contended that he acted with total innocence. The public prosecutor’s office, on the other hand, saw complete culpability.
Case reopened after 2017 verdict
In 2017, the district court in Meilen ZH sentenced the German to 12.5 years in prison for intentional killing, rape and sexual assault. It ordered outpatient therapy.
In 2019, the Supreme Court overturned this ruling. It recognized self-inflicted incapacity and imposed the maximum permissible sentence of 3 years. It also ordered an inpatient measure. It acquitted the accused of sexual offenses, but did not believe the woman’s statements.
The federal court reversed the verdict in 2021 and ordered the high court to reconsider the case regarding both offenses. This time, the Supreme Court classified the statements of the woman as credible. The totality of the evidence would have convinced that the incident had taken place as described. A rape conviction resulted.
Regarding the homicide, the presiding judge stated that after the crime, the accused did not give the impression that he was hallucinating in his first statements to the police. It was only in later interrogations that descriptions of increasingly distorted perceptions of what was happening came up.
Cocaine and ketamine involved
The accused had testified that he had not consumed very much cocaine and ketamine before the crime, which was also confirmed by the Institute for Forensic Medicine. According to his own statements, during the course of the argument he certainly perceived his friend as his friend and not as an “alien”, as he had told the psychiatric expert.
The Supreme Court came to the conclusion that the accused was not totally innocent at the time of the crime. In the course of the argument, there were phases “where he could have stopped” hitting his friend, the judge said. However, the culpability was greatly reduced. If this were not the case, the sentence would have been “certainly not less than 18 years of age”.
In this long time with all the different verdicts, he went through an “unprecedented roller coaster ride,” said the judge. You have to give him credit for the fact that it bothered him. And “we take it from him” that he is sorry for the whole thing today. Nevertheless, K. was now sentenced much more severely, i.e. in 2019 – the High Court has quadrupled its own judgment. (SDA)
* Name changed