Skinheads beat 13-year-old Dusan to death: They broke his neck kicking him with metal boots

22 long years have passed since Serbia was shocked by the news that Dusan Jovanovic, a 13-year-old boy, had died after being brutally beaten by two skinheads. Although this tragic story has been told many times, the murder of little Dusan Jovanovic remains an unhealed wound that will cause Serbia to suffer for a long time.

On October 18, 1997, 13-year-old Dusan Jovanovic, a Romani boy, passed away as a result of a brutal beating inflicted by two teenagers in Beogradska Street in the center of the capital. He had asked his father for money for to buy a bottle of Coca-Cola, which he loved drinking very much, and the unfortunate man, not realizing that he would send his son straight to death instead of a store, gave Dusan the money.

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On the way to the store, the teenagers, who later turned out to be skinheads, intercepted him. At first they asked for money, and when he refused to hand it to them, they started punching him. They threw him to the ground, and the blows came one after the other - they kicked the unfortunate child all over his body and head with metal-reinforced boots, until he stopped giving signs of life. All the time he kept the money meant for this favorite soda clutched in his hand.

He was only 13 years old. Photo: Telegraf

Little Dusan Jovanovic died as a result of a broken neck and was buried in a white casket two days later in the presence of hundreds of people who had come to say farewell to the unfortunate child one last time.

Dusan's father, Aleksandar Jovanovic, later told the media that, realizing that the child had not returned home, he went out to look for him.

"I found him lying on the stairs, his head bent backwards. Then I yelled, 'Who killed my son?' Neighbors came out, and I didn't know what to do. I ran to a neighbor, told her to call the police, and then my wife came out. I told her, 'They've killed our son' and she started screaming," Aleksandar told reporters back in 1997. Dusan's father was describing that infernal evening, never knowing that almost all of his family would be gone a few years later.

The mother committed suicide, the father died after a serious illness

The tragic fate of the Jovanovic family didn't end with the boy's death. Dusan's mother couldn't live without her son and repeatedly tried to kill herself, according to Dusan's sister Kristina, who was born three years after his death.

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"She never tried to take her life while I was in the house. When I was born, everyone was even saying that she had become a completely different person. However, she could never accept that her son was gone. A week before she took her own life, we noticed that she was depressed. And one day when I came home, I was the one to find her...," Kristina Jovanovic told the daily Blic earlier.

On that July 12, 2015, Dusan's mother died as well.

"Dule's birthday was August 1. During all those 18 years, she talked about wanting to be with her son for his birthday. And so she waited and waited. And that last year, she couldn't any longer. She wanted to be with him. She was buried next to Dusan."

Then a 15-year-old girl, living a life too hard for a teenager, she grew up with the memory of her little brother, whom she had never seen, and in addition to all the troubles that happened to her, she had to take care of her ill father, because Aleksandar had both of his legs amputated due to a serious illness.

Three years after his wife, Aleksandar, too, passed away, while young Kristina was left to struggle alone with a harsh life and immense sadness.

"I would like a documentary to be made about Dule (nickname for Dusan) so that his tragic death is never forgotten," Kristina Jovanovic concluded at the time.

The killers were arrested and convicted

After kicking a child to death with their metal-reinforced boots, the monsters hiding behind an extremist ideology fled in the direction of the former main train station at the bottom of Nemanja Street. Because the police had a detailed description of them, they were found and arrested within hours.

Milan Cujic and Istvan Fendrik from Zemun were put on trial and sentenced to ten years in prison each, and sent to serve their time in the Juvenile Correctional Institution in Valjevo. After spending four years in prison, Fendrik agreed to tell the weekly NIN what happened that day.

"I was sure the whole world was mine. At that time I didn't even think about the right of somebody to have their ideas, ideology, as long as it doesn't endanger others. That period of my life was occupied with such rapture, it left a mark. An indelible one. It's pretty hard to totally overcome it all, but I'm trying to overcome it. I honestly wish I didn't have any percentage of my old self, when it comes to that," Fendrik told NIN.

Dusan is gone, while his killers have been free for a long time.

(Telegraf.rs/Blic)