Veliko Gradiste Shooting Kills Niece, 19, Brother-in-Law
A border police officer shot four relatives in Veliko Gradiste on Saturday, killing his brother-in-law and 19-year-old niece. He wounded his sister and the victim's mother, then killed himself.
On Saturday, August 29, at around 1:30 p.m., a shooting broke out at a family home on a dead-end street in Veliko Gradiste. According to police findings so far, the attacker was border police officer B.K., who fired a handgun at four members of his own immediate family, in front of the house and in the yard, before turning the gun on himself.
Killed were the suspect’s brother-in-law, a firefighter and rescue worker by profession, and his 19-year-old niece, the biological daughter of that brother-in-law and the attacker’s sister. Both died at the scene. The attacker’s sister and the mother of his brother-in-law, that is, the firefighter’s mother-in-law, seen from the perspective of the family he had married into, were seriously wounded. Both women were taken to the hospital, where doctors are fighting for their lives. The type of weapon used has not yet been officially disclosed, and police have not said whether it was the attacker’s service weapon.
Initial reports on exactly who was killed in the shooting varied. In its first story, the Informer news portal reported that B.K. had killed his sister and brother-in-law. Later articles from the same outlet, as well as both of Telegraf’s reports, state that the brother-in-law and the 19-year-old niece died at the scene, while the sister and the brother-in-law’s mother were wounded and medical staff are still fighting for their lives.
The crime was discovered by a girl of around eighteen who often rides her bike down that street. She saw a motionless female body in front of the house and immediately went to tell her parents what she had seen. They then alerted police. According to residents, the street where the house stands is quiet and a dead end, with only a handful of family homes, and the shooting further unsettled a neighborhood that rarely encounters this kind of event.
A neighbor happened to be grilling nearby at the time. He heard two shots, but his first thought was not that something terrible had happened in the house across the way.
“The neighbor was grilling and heard two shots. Since a dog that someone had let loose had been wandering the area for days, his first thought was that someone had actually shot the dog,” a neighbor from the area told Informer.
According to residents, the dog only started whining after the shooting, which they now say was one of the first signs that something had happened in the yard. Up until that point, even the gunshots had gone almost unnoticed on a quiet street where, neighbors say, this kind of thing does not happen.
The shooting is believed to have been triggered by a family dispute over unresolved property matters, a disagreement over who owned which part of the family estate. One source also mentions that the attacker’s father had left him out of his will, which, according to that version of events, further strained relations within the family before the shooting. That detail has not been officially confirmed, and police have not yet released the exact sequence of events that preceded the shooting, nor how long the conflict had been going on before it turned into a crime.
Along with ambulance crews and police, two prosecutors from the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Pozarevac, a deputy chief prosecutor and the prosecutor on duty, arrived at the scene. An investigation into the circumstances of the shooting is under way, and the scene was processed by inspectors from the Pozarevac police department.
We have not previously reported on this case. It is the first official incident of this scale in Veliko Gradiste in recent memory, and residents of the small Danube municipality, according to neighbors’ accounts, remain shaken by what happened on their street.
