Sick with Alzheimer’s, he commits a murder in the family and does not remember it


In 2020, an 88-year-old Japanese man stabbed his 16-year-old granddaughter to death. Suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, he has no memory of it today.

An unbelievable affair. In Japan, an 88-year-old man has admitted to stabbing his granddaughter to death but has no memory of it, due to Alzheimer’s disease. It was in 2020, in the city of Fukui, that the tragedy occurred. On the evening of September 9, an argument reportedly broke out between Susumu Tomizawa, then 86, and his 16-year-old granddaughter he was living with, Tomomi. Very drunk, the old man would then have seized a 17 cm kitchen knife and struck several blows at the teenager, entrenched in her room.

Judged on May 31 according to CNNTomizawa pleaded not guilty, his lawyers believing that he “was insane at the time due to his dementia and drinking”. Nevertheless, several doctors who assessed the octogenarian’s mental health said that Susumu Tomizawa had a motive for the murder of his granddaughter. “His actions were thoughtful and consistent with his intent to kill“, in particular underlined the psychiatrist Hiroki Nakagawa at the helm.

The man sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison

Although he has no recollection of the tragedy, Susumu Tomizawa was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. The judges found that the defendant’s memory loss did not completely impair his judgment. “After careful consideration and consultation with the defendant, we have made a prudent decisionJudge Yoshinobu Kawamura said. The defendant was in a state of mental exhaustion at the time of the crime and had difficulty judging right and wrong and dissuading himself from committing it, but he was not in such a state that he could not not help it.”

In Japan, where the population is the oldest in the world, the number of crimes committed by elderly people is constantly on the rise. “Ljapan’s prisons are full of elderly inmates with dementiapoints out Koichi Hamai, expert in criminal justice and professor of law at Ryukoku University in Kyoto.



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