On the surface, there was little to indicate that Tim Kretschmer was a mass killer, capable of slaughtering 15 people with his father’s 9mm Beretta pistol he then turned on himself.
Like many other teenagers, the 17-year-old trainee salesman — described as “unremarkable” and “reserved” — enjoyed working out at the gym and was a keen table-tennis player.
With the benefit of hindsight, however, there were some clues: he had been suffering from depression, enjoyed grisly horror movies and violent “shoot-em-up” computer games.
And in addition to his other sporting activities, he would often train at the shooting range of which his father Joerg, a successful local businessman employing over 150 people at a packaging firm, is a member.
But none of this made him stand out as anything unusual, let alone a crazed killer.
Kretschmer “grew up in a happy family and had a sister — five years younger — with whom he had a good relationship,” Heribert Rech, interior minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg state, which includes Winnenden, told reporters.
Kretschmer “did not have many friends but did have a few … and was interested in one particular girl,” Rech said.
Other teenagers described him as “reserved,” “unremarkable” and even “friendly” but he was nonetheless somewhat of a loner, with few friends.
“He was simply not accepted by anyone and just sat all day in front of his computer,” one schoolmate, Mario, told German television station N24.
Police who seized his computer after the massacre said he was particularly keen on shooting games — especially the violent Counter-Strike — and had become a real-life crack shot.
Der Spiegel magazine quoted Michael, one of his table-tennis partners, as saying Kretschmer had “thousands of horror videos at home” and was “rather unique.”
Academically, he was described as “average,” graduating from the Albertville school with mediocre grades.
From April until September 2008 he received psychiatric treatment that was meant to resume — at the very clinic outside which he shot one person during the rampage.
In his own words, he had simply “had enough of this crummy life.”
Seven hours before the carnage, he told a friend on an Internet chat room: “Shit, Bernd. I have had enough … always the same. People are laughing at me, no one recognizes my potential.”
Then he issued his chilling warning: “I have weapons here and tomorrow morning I will go to my old school. You will hear about me tomorrow. Make note of the name of the place: Winnenden.”
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
The race for New Taipei City mayor is being keenly watched, and now with the nomination of former deputy mayor of Taipei Hammer Lee (李四川) as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, the battle lines are drawn. All polling data on the tight race mentioned in this column is from the March 12 Formosa poll. On Christmas Day 2010, Taipei County merged into one mega-metropolis of four million people, making it the nation’s largest city. The same day, the winner of the mayoral race, Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), took office and insisted on the current
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
RSS