New evidence provides clarity: was IJmuidenaar (60) killed or fallen?

Everyone knows each other in the apartment building at Sam Vlessinghof in IJmuiden, there is a know-us atmosphere. Moreover, the building has really been renovated in recent years, after years of nuisance from drug traffickers and addicts in and around the corridors of the building. But those days are now behind us, to the relief of the residents.

Until October of last year, then the neighborhood was shocked again. One of the fellow residents lay dead in his apartment on the ground floor. To say that the neighbors expected something like this is going too far, but they were not entirely surprised that it happened to this man in particular.

They were regularly bothered by him. “He drank a lot and made a lot of noise,” several neighbors said. “He had a few days ago already had blows“, a neighbor told NH on camera the day after his death.

Drunken fall or violent death?

It made the man’s sudden death suspicious. He was found on his stomach in a pool of blood. Did that come after a drunken fall? Or did he meet a more violent end?

The neighbor, and a few other neighbors who preferred not to appear in front of the camera, ultimately thought it was a very sad and poignant event: “I know the man from the past. He was smart and had a family with children. Later he became quite hit rock bottom.”

A few days later, a 42-year-old IJmuiden resident was arrested. A friend. But the day of the death was not very amicable: the two had quarreled. The suspect had hit his buddy in the head, on his eyebrow.

But that one blow could not actually be the cause of death, he said in court in February. That must have been the drink: his friend was often so drunk that he simply collapsed.

Released last week

The Public Prosecution Service had serious doubts about that story: the dead IJmuide resident was said to have suffered many more serious blows on the day of his death and was found in a large pool of blood.

But new forensic evidence from the investigation now seems to have cleared up the matter: the blow and the death are unrelated. The 42-year-old IJmuide resident was already released last week.

Officially he is still a suspect. Because there was already a preliminary hearing in the case in February, the judge will soon have to make a judgment himself. There are no other suspects in the case.

See how neighbors responded to the man’s death in October in this video.