The discovery came at an extremely tense moment — just a day earlier, on July 8, in Schongau, Bavaria, a 16-year-old had seriously stabbed two schoolgirls on the grounds of a gymnasium, and all of Bavaria was still talking about it. This is precisely why the death list in Munich was met with an immediate response.
How It Came to Light
The teachers arrived at the Neuhausen police station at around 8:15 p.m. The photograph they brought was not an abstract threat but a concrete document: it named several students at the same school and described, step by step, how the authors of the note intended to deal with them. For police, this was a signal for immediate action — in cases involving threats against schoolchildren, delay is unacceptable, especially in light of the recent events in Schongau.
The investigation moved quickly. Both authors — teenagers aged 16 and 17 — were identified within hours, and by around 10:20 p.m. that same evening, just over two hours after the teachers first came forward, police had detained them at their home address.
What the Search and Questioning Revealed
A search of the suspects turned up the original death list — the very document whose photograph had circulated on social media. During questioning, both teenagers did not deny authorship and said the note had been written as a joke, without any intention of actually harming anyone. After checking this account, investigators found no indication that the threats had been serious in nature. Nevertheless, the act of drawing up such a list was not without consequences: proceedings were opened against the teenagers under the statute covering disturbance of public order through threats to commit a crime — a comparatively mild legal classification, applied precisely in cases where there is no evidence of genuine intent to attack. After the necessary procedural steps, both were released into their parents’ custody.
Why the Response Was So Swift This Time
The speed and seriousness of the police response can hardly be considered apart from what happened the day before in Schongau. There, a 16-year-old former student of the Welfen-Gymnasium attacked two 13-year-old girls on school grounds and seriously wounded them with a knife, having reportedly fired a shot from a firearm beforehand, according to Bavarian police. According to the clinic, the victims are now out of danger, but it emerged that the attacker had already been known to law enforcement: proceedings had been underway against him over 2025 incidents involving threats against classmates and the glorification of mass shootings on social media. This fact — that warning signs had existed before but had not led to the tragedy being prevented — largely explains why, this time, Munich’s teachers and police did not wait and instead acted preemptively.
What Is Happening at the School Now
The day after the incident, Police Inspectorate No. 42 arranged for youth specialists to provide support to the school — both students and teachers received psychological counseling. Further investigation of the case has been handed over to the criminal police, Commissariat No. 25.
Both incidents — the serious attack in Schongau and the death list in Neuhausen — exposed the same underlying problem: warning signs among teenagers often exist long before adults become aware of them. In Munich, this time there were no victims, and investigators concluded the threat had no real basis. But the speed of the response — just over two hours from the teachers’ report to the suspects’ detention — shows that after Schongau, schools and police in Bavaria have stopped treating such discoveries as something that can be overlooked.
Source: dpa
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