‘I never saw a sadder child than Stylianos’

A former acting headmaster of Ayia Varvara primary school told the trial over the death of 14-year-old Stylianos Constantinou on Tuesday that a pupil told staff a priest had put a cigarette out on him. The witness said the school escort told her the boy had round burn marks all over his body. When the escort asked him about them, he replied, “the priest put a cigarette on me”. She phoned the officer, who is the third accused in the case, and was asked whether the marks were fresh, after which she was told to report only fresh burns so that “a complaint could be filed”. “I felt like we were playing with the child’s mental and physical endurance,” she said. She said Stylianos came to school in his first year with “poor hygiene, blackened nails and stained clothes”. When she raised it with his mother, the mother said she was looking after his cleanliness. Stylianos spent breaks on his own, she said, and when asked other children why they did not play with him, they replied that “he never plays”. “I never saw a sadder child than Stylianos,” she said. She told the court that his teacher and the speech therapist reported three serious incidents between mid-February and early March 2011. In the first, Stylianos threw tangerines and classmates’ work, kicked staff and ran out of the school until his father found him. In the second, he assaulted a teacher, then tried to hit his mother as she tried to put him in the car; in the third, he overturned his desk and tried to grab a fire extinguisher. Questioned by prosecutor Elena Constantinou, she said two meetings had discussed the father’s violence, including a night when he hit the boy because he could not sleep. The case concerns the suicide of Stylianos in September 2019, with the court examining whether responsibility lies with members of his family and state services. The hearing resumes on Wednesday.