Plzeň drug addict stabs brother to death, wounds father with knives

In the Plzeň district of Slovany, a 29-year-old man with a severe drug addiction attacked his father and brother with knives: his brother died at the scene from blood loss, while his father suffered serious injuries but survived. The court established that the attack took place in November 2024 on Hlavanova Street, and found the defendant not criminally responsible due to drug-induced psychosis.

A punch turned into a knife attack

According to the court, the conflict began with a verbal argument: the man punched his father in the eye. When his brother tried to intervene, the defendant grabbed knives from the kitchen counter and began stabbing both relatives in the neck and chest.

The blows were so forceful that after several strikes the blades separated from the handles — doctors had to extract them from the father's body. The defendant's brother died at the scene from blood loss; the father survived only by a miracle.

“It was as if he turned into a monster”

The father refused to testify in court but gave investigators a detailed account of what happened. Hearing his son talking loudly to himself in the next room, he went in and reproached him for not taking his prescribed medication. “He got terribly angry, was rude. I didn't expect him to punch me in the eye,” the victim recalled.

According to him, his son had long suffered from drug addiction and had already been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward because of hallucinations caused by methamphetamine use. “It was as if he turned into some kind of monster. His face had a completely different expression. He wanted to kill me,” the father recalled. After that the man attacked him with two kitchen knives: “He was waving his arms around like someone possessed.”

Court finds the man not criminally responsible

According to forensic psychiatrists, at the time of the crime the defendant was in a state of toxic psychosis and was acting under paranoid delusions — he believed people wanted to kill him. In this state he was incapable of rational thought, and no logical argument could reach him.

Experts noted that the man is severely dependent on methamphetamine and marijuana, and also abuses opioids. Since he had already been treated before for a drug-induced psychotic disorder, the experts concluded he could have foreseen such consequences, and described him as a danger to society.

Presiding judge Jan Hošťa explained that the defendant had acted under the influence of a mental disorder — toxic psychosis — in which he completely lacked the ability to control himself, a state he had brought on through drug use. The court ultimately convicted the man not of murder, but of having induced his own criminal insanity through drug use — which is how Czech law classifies such crimes.

The court also found grounds for the mandatory treatment proposed by the experts: after serving his sentence, the man will be transferred to protective detention. For now he remains in treatment at the psychiatric hospital in Dobřany. The verdict has not yet come into legal force.

Source: novinky.cz