Man left his girlfriend to freeze to death

[Trevordidit]

Man left his girlfriend to freeze when she was struggling on a mountain hike.

He's been found guilty of manslaughter.

So many aspects of his account don't make sense - AIBU to wonder if he did it on purpose?

News article

Thanks for clarifying that, I’d wondered why English reports hadn’t mentioned it. Maybe the sm rumours of him climbing it with another woman were false or confused with a tribute post as pp suggested.

He's been named in full on X and on this thread - I'm not sure why the UK is so diligently abiding by Austrian laws here tbh.

Do we also only have his word for when he left her ? He could have left her long before he said he did ?
PM showed she had a virus, she was likely to have been feeling increasingly unwell, and I wonder if the type of man he is, shown by his prior actions, meant that she tried very hard to keep up with him even though she was ill and struggling, in inappropriate footwear.
On the article posted by a pp, on a climbing site, someone made the point that in climbing you can’t try to bring or force a weaker person up to your level, you have to all operate at the level of the weakest person, or things quickly go very wrong.
Even just at this, he spectacularly failed to act in a sensible way.

Yes, I wondered this too. As with his previous girlfriend, he was enjoying punishing her for not being able to keep up, even though he knew from the off that she was the weaker of the two.

It’s a 5 months suspended sentence (Bewaehrungsstrafe) and a fine. That’s it.

He’s not going to prison.

It was on the BBC. Screengrab attached and link here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k1xkllknmo

I think Otterly has it. This seems by far the likeliest explanation.

He makes her push on beyond the return point despite her struggling, dissuades the heli because he doesn't want a rescue and is determined they will summit, then she falls and the situation is immediately irrecoverable. Perhap she is unconscious and he can't pull her up or get her into the survival bag in that position. The only thing he could do is call for a rescue, but either panics because he has already declined one and doesn't want to be blamed or decides that this isn't survivable for her by the time a rescue team can get to her. So he goes on alone to get to a shelter as soon as he can.

At the very least, at the point he leaves her without making a call, he knows that she will certainly die.

You’re mixing up the ex-gf here who testified, who is not in doubt, with claims I’m referring to that he also climbed it after Kerstin’s death with another gf. Pinksalmon speaks German but was mistaken about the latter when she read the court reporting. Other sm posts I’d seen had also mentioned this but may have been mistaken. He did climb it again in the summer when he spoke to one of the rescue team, it emerged in court.

When people go to a beach and have the inclination to swim out at sea there's always warning signs if it isn't safe because of weather conditions or poor sight. Most people will observe the red flags and be risk averse. Some choose to ignore and carry on regardless.

It's all very well putting up a clear sign not to proceed but I think mountaineering should be flagged as danger ahead from the get go, especially during winter. In the car parks. Stations should be peopled at all times or a very clear warning that it isn't. Just like when on a beach there's a sign to say no lifeguards present.

It took both Thomas P, lead, who was found guilty of gross manslaughter and Kerstin G almost 9 hours to ascend 91 metres. By that stage Thomas was ignoring signals for help.

Someone mentioned monitoring watches in a pp. would they have picked up on the timings?

I am pretty convinced she died when he was still with her. That’s the only thing that makes sense of the timeline. Him panicking and not wanting help. Not giving her emergency blankets and a bivouac.

I suspect the judge thinks that too.

I tend towards this view as well, unfortunately.

They used the position of the lights on the webcam to determine rough timings (the webcam only recorded pictures each half hour I think).
They used the data from the watches too to determine how many metres they climbed in particular lengths of time.

Agree. The whole thing seems weird. I think you'd normally expect him to at least have put her blanket around her, or that she'd have done it herself. This leads me to think she wasn't in a safe place when he left her and that perhaps as others have said he pushed too far and then panicked when he realised he wasn't going to be able to get her somewhere safe.

Doesn't he claim that he likely did?

Problem is his poor judgement and decisions started before any possible hypothermia from what I've read - allowing her to climb in the first place in inappropriate footwear, starting later than planned in poor weather...

IIRC the CCTV of the mountain showed that they didn't move as a pair from about 8.45pm - so they were clearly in trouble but he waved off the rescue helicopter 2 hours later at 10.50pm and turned off his phone. He didn't call for help himself until 3.30am when he had descended the other side - almost 7 hours after she stopped moving.

Yes it's quite clear because it was a very starry night. Measurements on ascent were calculated by the webcam and that triggered rescue by helicopter. Which happened around 10.00pm, but that was declined by the lead, Thomas P. The headlamps were very clear. There was no cloud cover. Thomas P's descent was also visible.

The weather wasn't poor to start at the car park but it did deteriorate in that strong winds whipped up. There were other climbers as well who by then decided to go back.

Again I apologize for providing wrong information. To repeat: Thomas did climb Grossglockner the summer after the incident, and he met and talked with one of the rescuers, but I can't find anything about him being accompanied by a new girlfriend on Kronen Zeitung's livestream coverage of the trial.

Today I was served a post on Grey's Law and found it interesting and apropos of this topic:
"Grey’s Law, which says that ‘any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.’ Grey’s Law says that if somebody is incompetent for so long, or doesn’t take steps to resolve that, then their actions become malicious. Because if you know you’re incompetent, you should train, or learn to become better. At the very least, you should avoid a situation where you can do harm to other people. If you know you are not cut out to be a surgeon, you should stop doing surgery.

I’m sure we all know people in our lives who have weaponised their incompetence to get out of a job, or to place a burden on someone else. But what Grey’s Law is saying is that they are no longer just incompetent. They are also immoral."

Interesting point. I'm pretty much in sympathy with Grays law then. But there is a problem...

In my experience, incompetent people tend to lack such insight, and in fact, strongly believe in ther own competence. Driving is a good example of this.

That's going towards a moral outcome when it comes to negligence and cloaking it as incompetence. There's a vast difference as there is with negligence and intent.

Yes something doesn’t add up here. It’s not like they were in the death zone of Everest where he had to leave her to save himself.

She didn’t have the correct gear either I read. I wonder if her mother believes she was a better hiker than she actually was.

Thomas P was found guilty of the manslaughter of Kerstin G by gross negligence.

The judge ruled. The sentence was lenient. To say the least.

He meant to do it.

He wanted to kill a woman. He tried to do it to his previous girlfriend and it didn't work, even though he left her alone at night with no torch in freezing temperatures.

The second time he succeeded.

It was announced this morning that he is appealing.