One of my favorite railway stations on Earth (I'm from Alabama, if you remember....and we don't exactly have anything much to talk about)....is the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main station).
When I was introduced to the station in 1978, I stood there and admired the structure, the hustle-and-bustle, the mass of people moving constantly, and the timed arrival and departure of trains. Thousands enter the station every hour and depart. If you stood there in the morning rush-hour of 7 AM....you'd be amazed at what goes on.
Oh I agree, there are dozens of negative things about the station. There used to be tons of drug-dealers just outside the frontdoor. You used to have dozens of people laying around in the subway area who were getting over their morning dose of heroin. There are probably a dozen pick-pocket guys active every hour of the day in the station.
This week, I noticed another one of the negative factors.
Around the morning rush-hour....7:25 AM.....in the area around the McDonalds establishment....some guy wandered in and stabbed two guys. Both survived and customers jumped on the stabber-guy.
Cops did a fair amount of conversation with the stabber-guy, and have come to announce now that he basically heard 'voices' in his head to stab folks. The guy is 48 years old.
The two wounded folks? One was an older guy (78 years old) and he was hurt pretty badly (he might be in the hospital for a week or two. The other was 30 years old and marginally hurt.
What'll happen to the stabber-guy? The German judge will likely send him off to a mental ward for a month of tests. A report will be written up and the judge will review it. I'm guessing that he'll force the stabber-guy into some treatment program which has some attachment to it....if you don't improve, you don't leave the facility.
The thing about this though.....if you stand and think about it, in all of Frankfurt, there are probably a hundred people who are on the borderline of doing the same thing. So you are mostly waiting for them to react, hoping they don't kill anyone, and that the judge will do the corrective action required.
This is one of those little problems with the train station....in that you have lots of people transiting the place, who might be crazy or marginally-safe to exist in society. You are depending on just plain luck to survive each day. Sadly for the two guys here in this case.....they happened to decide to stop in at McDonalds to get a coffee that morning and met up with some guy with mental issues and a knife.
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