Berlin, November 11th, 2026 (The Berlin Spectator) – The 22-year-old man suspected of killing 13-year-old Lisa Ta from Berlin-Marzahn has died in a hospital. Alan Bauer, a spokesman for the Berlin public prosecutor’s office, said the man died at around 6:25 a.m. on Wednesday.
Police had arrested him on Sunday in an uninhabited house in Bad Freienwalde, Brandenburg, where the girl’s body was found. According to authorities, he tried to shoot himself when officers arrived and suffered life-threatening head injuries. He had been in intensive care since then. His body is to be autopsied, and prosecutors say establishing the exact cause of death is part of the investigation.
Lisa had gone missing a week earlier. When, where and how she was killed remains unclear, and further examinations have been ordered. Prosecutors say they will release very little information, citing the special protection owed to a child’s privacy. The suspect’s death makes the work harder, since investigators now depend on witness statements, physical evidence and forensic medicine.
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Establishing a motive may be largely impossible. Authorities say the man did not know the girl before the crime. Police have seized a vehicle that may have been used, and it is still being examined. It is also unclear how the two got from Berlin to the house in the Altglietzen district.
The case has also raised questions about how the authorities handled the suspect earlier. Berlin prosecutors began investigating him in January 2025 on suspicion of buying and possessing child sexual abuse material via a darknet platform. His apartment, located close to the girl’s family home, was searched in March 2025, and data storage devices seized then are still being analyzed. More than 900 files, mostly photos and videos, were later found on a phone he carried during a traffic stop in Bavaria.
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Police in Passau had stopped him for driving with stolen license plates, and he tried to flee before being checked. A Passau court sentenced him to one year of probation in October. Berlin prosecutors say they did not know about that verdict because it had not been entered into the Federal Central Criminal Register. They also say there had been no grounds to seek an arrest warrant in the earlier child pornography case, since he had no prior convictions and a permanent address.
