The daughter of the 89-year old gunman involved in the Athens shooting this Tuesday, speaks about her father, recounts the ordeal with his pension payments, his social security stamps, and the EFKA, and outlines the path that led to the fateful day.
“At some point he had come to tell me that he was sending letters to the Supreme Court and to the court in The Hague saying they owed him money, that he would get a rifle, that he would go and kill them. He told me these things, but my mind couldn’t wrap around it. And of course I always told him, ‘Stop talking nonsense. The things you’re saying are crazy.’”
The dispute over his pension had already become an obsession.
The daughter of the 89-year-old, speaking about the pension dispute, exclusively on MEGA:
“I know they had caught him with the rifle. Now, had they put him in prison? Had they put him in a psychiatric facility? I don’t know. He was sending threatening letters to the Supreme Court and to The Hague.
He was consumed by it. That was his only ‘job,’ supposedly. Constantly, that is. Sending the letters and threatening that he had a rifle and that if they didn’t give him his pension he would go and kill them.”
She describes her father as a highly intelligent man:
“He is an extremely smart man. He was very detail-oriented and thorough in his work. He once said — I’ll say this was in a moment of clarity — that if he hadn’t been so hot-tempered and had stayed at the first job he had from the beginning, he would have earned much better money.”
She herself wonders what went wrong, particularly given how central the issue of his pension would later become.
“He worked in a factory that made screws, but he kept changing jobs, from what he had told me at some point in the past. He would get into arguments, leave, not go to another job, and at some point he had opened his own workshop, which didn’t go well and he had closed it shortly before he retired. He was wasting a lot of money on supposed magic. He had gone to India to do these things. He had someone there in Athens to whom he was giving good money to supposedly cast spells. So I know that he has wasted a great deal of money on these things.”
As she herself says:
“I couldn’t take it 100% seriously because this business about ‘I have a rifle and I’ve filed a lawsuit and I’ve taken it all the way to the court in The Hague’, because he had gone to the court in The Hague and had wasted a lot of money doing so, so I imagine he must have actually hired some lawyer. This is something I’ve been hearing for 10 years, maybe more. 10, 12 years, so you just say, okay, it’s not real, you just don’t take it seriously.”
“To me, he was a stranger”
What she says next is striking:
“Our relationship wasn’t good — from when I was a child it wasn’t good. As a baby they had left me in the village, with my mother’s parents and my mother’s sister. They were the ones who raised me. And because I had grown up there, in his mind it was that I had been bewitched into loving them more than I loved him. Whenever he and I were together he would constantly argue with me, that spells had been cast on me, that he was casting counter-spells so I would leave them. Crazy stuff, things that no person in their right mind could comprehend.
His mind couldn’t accept the fact that they had taken me in, loved me, and raised me without having any obligation to do so. I was their grandchild. It’s not that they were obligated to raise me. His mind couldn’t accept that this might be the reason I love them. It was that spells had been cast on me to love them and not want him. To me, he was a stranger, and every time he came to take me out, it wasn’t as if he was showing me affection — I can’t say, okay, this is my father.”
She continues:
“He had personally told me that demons were chasing him, that they would come at night and wake him up and beat him and pin him down so he couldn’t move. I constantly told him that he needed to see a doctor, to look into what could be done about that. That there are medications that could help him. And he told me that I was the crazy one, that he wasn’t crazy. When I had come to Greece in 2022, and had gone and found my aunt, his sister, and his niece, who were supposedly taking care of him, I had told my aunt: ‘You know what, Auntie, he has a problem, you need to help him. He doesn’t listen to me, he doesn’t talk to me. He doesn’t talk to his own daughter.’ I said, ‘Tell him, convince him to see a doctor. Take him to a doctor yourselves.'”
And she adds:
“You don’t say something like that as a joke, that you’ll pick up a pistol and go shoot people because someone owes you 100 euros. And she tells me ‘No,’ she says, ‘your father has no problem, everyone just treats him that way and…’ crazy stuff like that. And I say, ‘Auntie, I’m begging you, that’s not what’s going on. I mean, about demons and devils that beat him at night, those things aren’t normal. Whatever I say to him, he doesn’t listen to me, he insults me, he goes after me. You, I’m saying you, whom he does listen to, tell him to see a doctor at least, do something from your end since you care about him.’ The outcome, two days later, was that he came back and told me that I am not his child, that I don’t want what’s best for him, and to leave him alone. And after that he cut off even saying good morning to me.
A few days after that, when I went to take care of some notarial matters, to sort out some papers I needed, I found out that he had signed over his entire estate to his sister and his niece. I am very sorry for what happened. I wish I could have done something more, years earlier, to stop it. My mind can’t wrap around it. It’s completely insane. Because that person didn’t deserve to go to work and end up in the hospital for no reason, over 100 euros related to his pension..”
