In December 2025, the prosecutor’s office concluded an investigation into the events in Skała. In December 2024, a resident of the village was murdered there, another resident was the victim of an attempted murder, and the entire property was ultimately set on fire, while the perpetrator of the aforementioned acts took his own life.
On December 30, 2024, the fire service in Jawor was notified of a fire involving a barn and two adjacent buildings in the aforementioned town. – During firefighting operations, firefighters found a 69-year-old man in front of the building, bound with a cord and tied to a garden chair, with gunshot wounds to the chest – reports Liliana Łukasiewicz of the District Prosecutor’s Office in Legnica. – Inside one of the buildings, the bound body of another man, aged 51, was found, with blunt-force injuries to the head and gunshot wounds to the chest. It was suspected that the perpetrator of both acts could be 39-year-old Marcin P., for whom the man who had been killed was a neighbor, while the bound and shot man was his uncle.
When the body was discovered, it was not known for certain where the perpetrator was. Spokeswoman:
During the firefighting operation, it turned out that he had been hiding on the upper floor of the burning building the entire time. He was carrying a weapon—a black-powder revolver, for which no permit is required. To ensure safety, firefighting was suspended and officers from the Independent Counter-Terrorist Police Subunit (SPAT) were called in. After entering the building, the officers found Marcin P.’s body with gunshot wounds to the head. The man had committed suicide.
The property where the tragedy occurred consisted of three buildings and a shared yard. One building contained living quarters; Marcin P.’s surviving uncle lived on the ground floor, while Marcin occupied the upper floor. They maintained separate households. The uncle and nephew lived peacefully, although they were not close. Marcin P. had never received psychiatric treatment and did not display symptoms in his everyday functioning indicating psychiatric problems.
On an precisely undetermined day between December 28 and 30, Marcin P.’s neighbor, who later died, came to his uncle’s home. The men drank alcohol. At one point, Marcin P. entered the room where the aforementioned men were sitting and, without warning, fired two shots at the neighbor, who fell from the stool onto the floor as a result of the bullets’ impact.
The shots were fired from an A. Uberti .44-caliber percussion revolver. Possession of this weapon does not require a permit because it is a replica of a weapon manufactured before 1885.
A moment later, using the same weapon, Marcin P. approached his uncle and shot him at least twice in the chest, then tied his hands and legs with cord and gagged him with a shirt.
Marcin P. then struck the neighbor, who was lying on the floor, on the head with a hammer, causing massive bleeding and the aforementioned man’s death. He then struck his uncle on the head several times with the same hammer.
Prosecutor: – During the incident, Marcin P. told the victims that he would deal with them and then go and do the same to the nearby neighbors, after which he left the room, leaving behind the injured man and the man who was already dead, and never returned there. The following morning, Marcin P. went to a gas station to buy food for himself, and after returning, used a flammable liquid to set fire to each of the three buildings on the property. After starting the fire, he remained on the property in areas not yet affected by the flames.
The actions of the services, including the counter-terrorist subunit and police negotiators from the Provincial Police Headquarters in Wrocław, who used loudspeakers to call on the man to engage in talks, were unsuccessful. The man committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with the same weapon he had earlier used to shoot the victims.
Marcin P.’s uncle suffered gunshot wounds and injuries to the skull that resulted in a health impairment lasting more than seven days.
Marcin P.’s actions were legally classified as murder and attempted murder combined with unlawful deprivation of liberty, as well as causing an incident in the form of a fire.
The investigation established that in the past Marcin P. had displayed aggressive behavior toward another resident of Skała, whom he injured with an axe, killed a cat belonging to the uncle who was a victim, and eventually attacked him with a plank. Nevertheless, despite this troubling activity in the past, none of the witnesses interviewed testified that Marcin P. had recently shown disturbing psychological symptoms. On the contrary, they said that he was making plans for the future and that the behavior he committed came as a shock to everyone.
The proceedings were discontinued due to the perpetrator’s death.