The brutal incident took place on Saturday evening in the Dalmatian town of Drniš, about 30 kilometers from Šibenik. The murdered boy, a recent high school graduate and talented member of the local basketball club, took a weekend shift for his friend.
According to the Index.hr server, the perpetrator fired “a dozen bullets” at the courier. Then he took his backpack and ran away. The teenager was delivering pizza with another colleague who stayed in the van and managed to flee the scene after the shots were fired, after which he informed the police.
Everyone knew from the beginning that the murderer was Kristijan Aleksič, whom the local people know for his aggressive nature and his unfortunate past. In 2002, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the murder of a 22-year-old woman committed in 1994.
Aleksič then waited for the victim when she went home from work. He stabbed her seventeen times in the back with a bread knife, which he had specially sharpened beforehand, wrote the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija. Then he beat her with a metal rod. The murder remained unsolved for seven years.
“Pure Evil”
Aleksiš, who was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment, also faced criminal charges from 2023 for illegal possession of weapons and the manufacture of explosives, the police said in a press release. Criminal investigators are now investigating which weapon he used to murder the pizza courier and how he got it.
The inhabitants of Drniš have been complaining for a long time that Aleksič is spreading fear in his surroundings. He claimed that he would “shoot up the whole city” and allegedly had a list of 12 people he was going to kill. His brother also distanced himself from him when he said that Kristijan was “pure evil”.
Numerous police units, helicopters and drones were involved in the search for Aleksič. He was caught in the bushes next to the local bakery, about a hundred meters from his house.
The basketball club said goodbye to its murdered member with a touching statement. “We are in a state of immense pain that tears the soul, and the heart finds no peace, only questions and suffering. Our city lived for years in fear and anxiety, feeling the danger, while those responsible remained silent and did not react,” wrote the teenager’s sports colleagues.
