In Belgrade, a retrial has ended with a verdict that satisfies the howl of public rage and the cold arithmetic of the law. The parents of the thirteen-year-old who, in May 2023, methodically murdered nine children and a guard at his school, have been sentenced to prison terms. The father received fourteen and a half years; the mother, three. This is not merely a judicial outcome. It is a mirror held up to a society that has long indulged in its own illusions about violence, parenting, and the rot of modernity. The nation demands justice, they say. But what precisely does that mean? Does it mean that we punish the negligent until we feel purged? Or does it mean that we finally look at the wreckage and ask how we arrived here, in a world where a boy can plan a massacre in his bedroom while his parents sleep the sleep of the distracted?
The killer, Kosta Kecmanović, was too young to be held criminally responsible under Serbian law. He was sent to a psychiatric institution. The state therefore turned to the only remaining agents of accountability: his guardians. The father, a radiologist, kept guns in the house, including the two handguns his son used. The mother, also a physician, has been portrayed as either complicit in her obliviousness or simply absent. The court found that they knew of his plans or should have known. The evidence was damning. He had drawn sketches of the attack. He had written lists of classmates to target. He had rehearsed. And yet the parents, immersed in their own lives, saw nothing. Or, more likely, they saw but chose not to see. For that, they are now in prison. The nation cheers. I find myself uneasy.
Not because I believe they are innocent. They are not. The father, in particular, bears a weight of negligence that borders on the criminal. But we must ask ourselves: what does jailing these parents accomplish beyond the satisfaction of our moral theatre? It is an act of scapegoating, a ritual cleansing. We sacrifice the family so that we do not have to examine the deeper sicknesses: the violent videos the boy watched, the gun culture that Serbia has clung to long after the wars ended, the breakdown of community and the hollowing out of childhood into a digital fever dream. The parents are guilty. But they are also symptoms. If we stop at their punishment, we fool ourselves. The nation demands justice, but the nation also demands a comfortable story: that the monster came from a bad home, and that the rest of us are absolved.
Let me be clear: I do not defend the parents. The father should have locked his guns. The mother should have seen the warning signs. Their negligence cost lives. But I remember another tragedy, another collapse: the fall of the Roman Republic, when the old moralists blamed the luxury of the age, the neglect of patria, the indulgence of children. They, too, jailed a few corrupt parents. And yet the Empire fell anyway. The lesson is that single verdicts do not halt civilisational decay. They are waystations. Serbia is a country still haunted by the ghosts of the 1990s, by a nationalism that breeds aggression, by a culture that glamourises violence even as it condemns it. The boy’s act was not an anomaly. It was a flowering of seeds long planted.
Consider the irony: in demanding justice, the public has focused on the only elements that can be legally addressed. The guns. The parents. The concrete failures. But what of the intangible? The culture of machismo that teaches boys that rage is power? The online communities that fed the boy’s fantasies? The schools that lack the resources to spot a budding psychopath? These are harder to jail. They require a revolution, not a verdict. The parents are now the faces of evil, which is convenient because they are easy to hate. But the evil they embodied is diffuse, a fog that has settled over the entire society.
I will not pretend that this retrial is pointless. It affirms a principle: adults are responsible for the destruction their children wreak. That is a necessary legal fiction. But let us not mistake a necessary fiction for the whole truth. The nation demands justice. Good. Let the parents serve their time. Let them rot in the popular imagination. But then let the nation turn its gaze inward and ask the harder questions. Why are our children so lost? Why do we arm them with phones that feed them poison? Why do we value convenience over vigilance? The fall of a civilisation is never caused by a single family. It is caused by a thousand small surrenders. The parents of Kosta Kecmanović are now symbols of those surrenders. But they are not the only ones who surrendered. We all did.
