“I’m going to slaughter my priest just like he slaughters the pigs,” and “I’ll kill him when I grow up, if he makes my mom cry again,” said Stylianos, who took his own life in September 2019, according to the special education teacher in his program during preschool and first grade, who testified today as a prosecution witness before the Nicosia District Court.
The witness, H.K., after reading the statement she had given in 2020 to one of the criminal investigators looking into the case, stated during today’s hearing that, when Stylianos was five years old and attending preschool, she participated in his evaluation alongside his teacher and speech therapist, as part of the process followed to determine his educational needs. Following the evaluation, the District Committee on Special Education and Training decided to provide the child with special education for a few hours each week.
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After he began receiving special education sessions as part of his program, the witness reported that Stylianos’s behavior was particularly intense after weekends, when he would arrive at school “very agitated.” She described a child who was usually “sullen,” didn’t relax, and “didn’t smile,” while using expressions that, as she said, children his age didn’t typically use.
Speaking about what he told her regarding his father, the witness stated that Stylianos would say, “I’m going to slaughter my priest just like he slaughters the pigs,” accompanying his words with a characteristic gesture. As she demonstrated in court, with his left hand he would hold his head back, and with his right he would make a motion as if holding a knife and slitting his throat from left to right.
Also, as she said, Stylianos would tell her, “I’ll kill him when I grow up if he makes my mom cry again.” When she asked him what had happened, the child wouldn’t answer her.
“When I asked him what happened, he would stop talking. I pressed him several times with different questions, but he wouldn’t answer,” she testified.
She added that on Mondays he would come to school particularly upset, and after she took care of him and cleaned him up, she would try to talk to him so he could express whatever was troubling him.
“I remember that one of our classes was on Monday morning. But first we had to go wash their faces, comb their hair, remove the crusts from their eyes, and clean their noses during the winter months before we could start the class. “That’s what stuck with me because it happened repeatedly,” she said.
The witness added that “he was almost always unkempt and dirty,” with the result that the other children didn’t want to sit with him. As she put it, “he smelled strongly,” his clothes were dirty, his fingernails were black, and his shoes smelled very strongly.
She mentioned that during recess, the teachers tried to include him in the other children’s games, though they didn’t always succeed.
“We tried to make sure the child wasn’t left alone—to convince the other children to sit on the same bench or play a game with him—but they refused. We couldn’t force them. Some children told us that the child smelled bad. Stylianos heard these things; they said them right in front of him,” she noted.
At another point, the witness referred to Stylianos’s mother, whom she described as a “tired woman” and, most of the time, “sad.” As she said, the mother of her child had mentioned that she worked long hours on the farm and that during the winter months she had her youngest child—who was about one to one and a half years old at the time—with her in the car to keep him warm.
“I remember her asking me, ‘Why isn’t my child walking yet?’ And so she confided in me that she kept the child in the car all the time to keep him warm because she was working on the farm. I told her to cut back a little on her work and spend more time with her little baby and Stylianos,” she added.
The witness also described what she called a “dramatic incident” that she remembered, when, during class, shouts were heard coming from Stylianos’s classroom. As she reported, the child had knocked over desks and chairs, his classmates’ books, and items on the teacher’s desk, and it took three or four teachers to intervene and calm him down.
The witness also referred to two meetings she had with Stylianos’s father when he was in first grade, saying that he made her feel “afraid.” In one of these meetings, the teachers discussed with him the time the child spent on the farm and his exposure to the slaughter of animals, with the aim of limiting those specific activities.
At another meeting, when Stylianos had been showing rashes for a few days, the teachers requested that the family’s relocation from their current home be considered, due to their living conditions. According to the witness, the father initially agreed, but later sent a message through the mother saying, “Let’s forget about it.”
The witness then referred to a multi-issue meeting held in February 2011 regarding Stylianos, stating that during that meeting she mentioned that Stylianos had gone to school one day with “a head injury and thick blood.” At the same time, she had referred to “serious cases of neglect,” as well as the “obscenities” the child used, while it was also noted that his father told him “not to listen to the teacher”.
At the same meeting, according to the witness, it was reported that Stylianos said he had seen “wild dogs eating live goats on his father’s farm.” As she stated, the teachers had observed that the child had difficulty processing what he saw on the farm, as “he would bring those experiences home and they seemed to upset him.”
The witness’s cross-examination is scheduled for October 2 at 9:30 a.m.
The case concerns the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of 14-year-old Stylianos Konstantinos, in September 2019, with the Court examining potential liability both within the family and on the part of government agencies.
