After failing to help a drowning friend, whose death he filmed, a 55-year-old man named Alex S. was sentenced to eight weeks in prison on Monday.
The pair were swimming at a lake in the Dutch town of Rosmalen, in 2022 when the victim asked Alex S. to film him in the water. They had been drinking heavily.
S. continued to film and did not intervene for at least ten minutes while the man’s body remained still in the water with his head bent forward, nu.nl reports.
Ten minutes of footage
In his ten-minute-long video of the tragic drowning, you can hear S. notice when things go very wrong: “He’s dead, you know… He drowned”.
He later told the court that he thought it was all a joke at first; the victim did not ask for help, wave his arms, or struggle.
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“Nothing happened for ten minutes. That’s hard to understand,” the judge says.
Eventually, S. pulled his drowned friend out of the water, tried to resuscitate him in a panic and called emergency services.
Eight weeks of prison
The judge found that an initial demand for an unconditional three-month sentence was too severe.
This was taking into account S.’s intellectual disability and the fact it took so long for the case to go to court.
Alex S. will now serve eight weeks, of which five are conditional. His lawyer announced immediately following the sentencing that he would appeal this.
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