PUPILS AND parents from Winnenden, scene of the shooting rampage in which 16 people died, were trying to come to terms with the horror of the day’s events last night. Laura Pino (17) said she was convinced she was going to be killed. “I was in the next classroom,” she said.
“We heard shots and the teacher went out to see what was happening. When we realised what was happening we threw ourselves on the floor. It was terrifying. We were on the floor thinking we were going to die.”
It would take a long time for her to recover from such violence carried out in a place she had considered her sanctuary, she said. “I am so shaken up. To have seen something like that,I don’t know, it’s awful.”
Last night police and local officials were attempting to explain what could have driven an outwardly ordinary young man to commit such an extraordinary act of violence. Tim Kretschmer, an only child and keen table-tennis player, was described by Helmut Rau, the regional education minister, as “never conspicuous”.
He took his final exams last year and had started vocational training.
Robin Dinerer (17) said there had seemed nothing unusual about him. “He seemed to be a completely normal guy, unremarkable. He never seemed aggressive,” he said.
But others painted a picture of a troubled mind whose frustrations were bubbling up under the surface of normality. An old classmate told local media he had been depressed because his girlfriend had left him and he had been putting on weight.
Another, Mario H, told Bild he tried to buy friends with money but still failed to make himself popular. In his profile on the social networking site Kwick.de, Kretschmer wrote: “What do I like about myself? Nothing. What do I hate about myself? Nothing.” Referencing Robert Musil’s novel, Spiegel magazine declared him to be the “the boy without qualities”.
For all his lack of enduring characteristics, however, he will be forever remembered as the person who brought terror and suspicion to this unremarkable town on the outskirts of Stuttgart which, until now, prided itself on its peace, quiet and ordinariness.
“Winnenden is such a quiet place: nothing happens here. In all the time I have lived here nothing has happened – and now this,” said Therese Marino, who had come to survey the scene at the school all four of her children went to when they were young.
Silke Drehe, who had fetched her daughter from the school after the shooting, said: “It’s just awful. I would never have thought that something like this could happen here.”
Yesterday morning, shortly after the first shootings, the Kretschmer family home in nearby Leutenbach was raided by police.
The boy’s father, a successful local businessman, is also a member of the local shooting club. According to the police, there were 16 weapons, one of which was missing.
In Germany’s worst school shooting, expelled student Robert Steinhaeuser (19) shot and killed 17 people and then himself at his former high school in the eastern city of Erfurt on April 26th, 2002.
Several people died in two school shootings in Finland in the past 16 months.
In September, a student killed 10 people before turning the gun on himself at a catering college in Kauhajoki, northwest of Helsinki. In November 2007, another assailant killed eight at a high school in the Finnish town of Jokela.
The shooting in Kauhajoki was the worst worldwide since a gunman in the US fired on students and teachers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in April 2007, leaving 32 people dead – ( Guardianservice; Bloomberg)