I killed son as I didn’t want him to be alone

A FATHER has told a court how he killed his toddler son before trying to commit suicide.

Lukasz Czapla, 41, said he shot Julius, two, in the head, before he is said to have smothered him with a pillow and stabbed him with a skewer.

The High Court in Edinburgh yesterday heard Czapla had decided to end his own life and did not want to leave the child alone.

Czapla told the court that he had cut his own wrists and shot himself in the chest with an air pistol as he ‘didn’t want to live’.

He said he had felt overwhelmed with emotions following a text exchange with his former partner, Patrycja Szczesniak.

The witness was caring for Julius, pictured, who had been playing with Lego in the hours before he died.

Czapla said he thought about how he discovered his father’s body when he was a boy in Poland and he did not want his son to have the same experience.

Weeping in the dock, Czapla told his lawyer Iain McSporran, QC,: ‘I know it sounds not very logical but in a sense I completely gave up and I didn’t see any point in living.

‘I thought about him and I thought about me, that I was dying, and I wouldn’t be there to support him... I didn’t want to leave him alone.’

He told the court that he decided he would kill Julius by shooting him when he was asleep, but the boy woke up in distress.

Czapla has admitted killing Julius in November 2020 at his home in Muirhouse, Edinburgh, but prosecutors declined to accept a guilty plea to the culpable homicide of his son. He is standing trial for murder but he says he was of diminished responsibility at the time. The trial continues.