Andreas Mihavecz

Andreas Mihavecz is an Austrian from Bregenz who holds the record of surviving the longest without any food or liquids. His ordeal is documented in the Guinness Book of Records.

On April 1 1979, the then 18-year old was put into custody in a holding cell for being a passenger in a crashed car and completely forgotten about by the three policemen responsible for him, namely Markus Weber, Heinz Ceheter and Erwin Schneider. Each of them thought that the two others had already freed Mihavecz. They also ignored pleas of his worried mother, who wondered where her son had vanished to.

Mihavecz survived by licking off moisture off the prison walls. As his cell lay in the cellar, nobody could hear his screams. He eventually lost 50 lbs. of weight and was near death. On April 18, he was found in his cell, near death, deprived of water and food for the entire seventeen days. He needed several weeks to regain his health.

In the criminal trial that followed, the three policemen accused each other. In the end, they were fined a paltry 4000 DM: firstly nobody could find out who was the main culprit, and secondly there was no evidence of criminal neglect. Two years later however, the civil court decided to pay Mihavecz 250,000 Kronen (~19,000 Euro).

References

The Guinness Book of World Records (1997), (2007)

Weblinks

This Austrian biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.