The Mixed Jury Court of Appeal of Thessaloniki imposed a total sentence of 12.5 years’ imprisonment on a 44-year-old man, who was found guilty of the death of his 82-year-old stepfather, after a beating he alleged the elderly man received in June 2024, in their apartment in the area of Toumba in Thessaloniki.
The defendant was found guilty of aggravated assault (on conversion from manslaughter with possible malice aforethought), as well as domestic assault, as he also appears to have struck his 82-year-old (now) stepmother.
In these circumstances, the sentence imposed on him at the Court of Appeal was reduced by 3 years compared to the trial court, which had granted him the mitigating factor of prior honest life (total sentence at the time was 15.5 years). The convict returned to prison to serve the remainder of the sentence.
The case was revealed on June 30, 2024, when a doctor at the “Papanikolaou” Hospital, where the 82-year-old man was taken for examination, reported to the police that the elderly man confided to him that both he and his wife had been beaten by their 44-year-old (step) son. A few 24 hours later, the elderly man succumbed to his head injury.
In testifying in the appellate court, the 82-year-old mother pleaded that her husband fell in the bathroom of the house, insisting that her son did not hit her husband. “The child is not responsible for my husband’s death,” the elderly woman testified, but she admitted that a fight had preceded it. “He was saying harsh words both to the child and to me,” she said.Asked by the court why the deceased told the hospital that he had been beaten, the woman replied as follows: “For the last two and a half years he had been saying a lot of gibberish.”
The 44-year-old denied beating his father, attributing the injury to a fall he had in the bathroom. He pointed to the loss of his sister two years earlier; a fact that had been a “thorn” in his relationship with his father. “I wanted him to stop talking about this issue. To look forward. He was a good father, but there were times when he said bitter words,” he said, among other things. He admitted that on the day in question he “argued” with his father and then shut himself in his room.
