Three months ago, on June 20, the duty officer at the Bolesławiec police station received a report that the body of a beaten woman had been found in a shed on Widok Street. We wrote about it. She was 53-year-old Grażyna O. Her face was severely bruised, her nose was broken and displaced, and she had head wounds from being struck with a bottle. Her attackers beat her brutally with their fists and kicked her. They mainly targeted her head. Ultimately, the woman, unconscious after the beating, choked on her own blood.
Grażyna was beaten during a drinking binge. Either her tormentors had invited her, or she simply came, as she had to many other such drunken gatherings. According to her friend, she had already been beaten once by the same people. But she did not report it anywhere. At that time, with a bruised face and black eyes, she went to the home of her drinking companion so that the woman would shelter her. She was afraid. Her friend says she urged her to see a doctor. But Grażyna had no insurance, so she did not go anywhere. After a month, the bruises and hematomas disappeared.
Grażyna and her disabled sons were known to neighbors and to people who remembered her from years earlier, when she rode the red bus. She regularly traveled with the children to the special school on Zgorzelecka Street. That was some twenty or twenty-five years ago. Strangers remembered only that routine. Every morning, she got off at a stop near the school with three disabled boys. But perhaps it only seems to them now that it happened regularly. Maybe they saw her only from time to time; human memory is, after all, unreliable.
A former teacher from that school says that Grażyna was a good mother and a person lost in life. She wanted to be good and cared for the children as best she could. She dressed the boys neatly, as far as possible, because their genetic disease involved, among other things, constant drooling. Life with three disabled children with the minds of perpetual three-year-olds would have broken many a strong person. Grażyna was strong in her own way, because who can judge how much strength is needed to care for three disabled children?
In June, on the last day of Grażyna’s life, during a drinking binge, twenty-six-year-old Elżbieta Ł. attacked her first. Grażyna was her aunt. Elżbieta repeatedly punched her aunt and then struck her in the face with an open hand. When Grażyna fell to the floor, Elżbieta kicked her around the head and slammed her head against the floor. Marek B. then joined Elżbieta—a peer of hers who kicked the victim in the head with great force and struck her temple with a door while dragging her into another room. Two more tormentors joined the beating: nineteen-year-old Patryk B. and twenty-year-old Dariusz W. All the attackers were younger than her eldest son.
Grażyna’s sons had been taken away from her several months earlier. She was no longer able to care for them. The special school, among others, intervened. They were taken to their father. No one wants to talk about it. Only her drinking companion describes how Grażyna broke down after her sons were taken away and how much she missed them. After all, she had tried to teach them everything, because she remembered how people mocked both them and her on the bus. Apparently, she taught the boys to iron, do laundry, and even make jars of preserves. But one day, one of them came to his mother, pulled a cigarette from her mouth, and burned his own hand with it. When asked what he was doing, he was said to have replied that they had taught him to do that in the neighborhood.
Her friend says that during the drinking binge in which Grażyna was beaten to death, Grażyna allegedly demanded money that Elżbieta was said to have stolen from Grażyna’s current partner. This was supposed to infuriate the girl, who was known in her circle for aggressive behavior. Grażyna’s grievance over the money was allegedly the reason the brutal beating began.
When the tormentors finished beating Grażyna, they placed her unconscious in an armchair and left, unconcerned about her condition. They returned two hours later and found that she was dead. They carried the body to the shed. After being arrested by the police, they confessed. Beating resulting in death is punishable by imprisonment for one to ten years.
(information: Grażyna Hanaf)