The co-pilot who rammed Germanwings Flight 9525 into a French mountainside this week was shattered after his schoolteacher fiancée dumped him a day earlier and he was declared “unfit to work” by a shrink — a diagnosis he hid from his bosses, authorities said Friday.
A note from a psychiatrist and a second from a neurologist both indicate Andreas Lubitz should never have been at the controls Tuesday, when he crashed the Airbus 320, killing himself and 149 others.
The stunning revelation came as a German newspaper quoted another of Lubitz’s ex-girlfriends recalling that within the past year, he had promised her that one day he’d “make everyone remember him.”
The ex, identified by Bild newspaper as “Maria, 26,” also said Lubitz would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “We’re crashing!”
“When I heard about the crash, one thing that he said kept going through my head: ‘One day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember it.’ ” the woman told the paper.
“I didn’t know what he meant, but now it makes sense.”
The doctors’ notes were found “slashed” to shreds along with other medical records during searches at his homes in Dusseldorf and Montabaur, Germany, prosecutors said.
The notes revealed that Lubitz was being treated for “an existing illness,” the prosecutors said, though they declined to specify what it was.
“The fact there are sick notes saying he was unable to work, that were found torn up, which were recent and even from the day of the crime, support the assumption that the deceased hid his illness from his employer and his colleagues,” said Ralf Herrenbrueck of the Dusseldorf prosecutor’s office.
Lubitz’s pilot license was up for renewal in June, and friends said he may have been terrified his mental state would derail his career if his superiors found out, Britain’s Mirror reported.
“He was obsessed. He would have died if he hadn’t passed the tests to [remain] a pilot,” a former classmate told the paper.
Lubitz, 27, had dreamed of flying jetliners since childhood.
German media said the avid jogger suffered from severe depression, anxiety attacks and a broken heart after splitting with his fiancée, whose last name is Goldbach but who has otherwise remained unidentified.
The couple had been together for seven years and shared an apartment in Dusseldorf, where a mailbox in their building shows her last name alongside his.
They had planned a 2016 wedding, but she ditched him on Monday, French TV channel iTELE reported.
Lubitz had bought two brand-new, his-and-her Audis several weeks before the plane crash — but only one had been delivered, the German news magazine Focus reported.
The owner of a pizza shop near the Dusseldorf apartment described them as a cordial couple.
“She was a polite and attractive woman.,” Habibalah Hassani, 53, told the MailOnline. “They would come in once, maybe twice a week. He used to tip well.”
A neighbor said the woman was distraught and was believed to be holed up with her family at an undisclosed hotel.
“I think she will be with her family grieving at the moment,” the unnamed neighbor said. “It is very sad.”
The fiancée is on the list of witnesses prosecutors plan to interview but is not a suspect, The Wall Street Journal reported.
A shrink in the Rhineland wrote the note in which Lubitz “was declared by a medical doctor unfit to work,” prosecutors said, according to Germany’s Süddeutsche newspaper.
It was unclear if the second note was also written by a psychiatrist or another medical doctor.
But a spokesman for Germanwings insisted that Lubitz “had a clean bill of health” and that the airline never saw the notes in question.
Under German privacy laws, a doctor isn’t required to tell a patient’s employer about any illness, and notes excusing the person from work should not include information about the patient’s condition.
Even though they are not required to report an illness, doctors have the discretion to do so if they think the patient poses a clear risk to others. — which did not happen in this case. Lubitz’s condition had not been reported.
Herrenbrueck said investigators so far had found no political or religious motivation for Lubitz’s actions.
His troubled past included seeking psychiatric help for “a bout of serious depression” after completing flight training in 2009, and he was still getting help from doctors, Bild also reported.
IAnd a note in Lubitz’s aviation authority file recommended regular psychological assessment for “depression and anxiety attacks,” the paper said.
Dusseldorf University Hospital confirmed Lubitz had been a patient there over the past two months, with his last visit for a “diagnostic evaluation” on March 10 — but denied reports that it had treated Lubitz for depression.
Investigators were also exploring whether the co-pilot had stopped taking prescription medication and were questioning local druggists, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper reported.
“The police have visited the pharmacy this morning. But I cannot talk about anything that occurs inside the pharmacy. We are required to protect all information about patients,” a pharmacist who works near Lubitz’s Dusseldorf apartment told the newspaper.
Lubitz struggled with depression six years ago, as a student at the Lufthansa flight school in Phoenix, Ariz., where he was ultimately found “not suitable for flying,” Bild reported.
Former classmates also said Lubitz took time off for “burnout syndrome” or depression, Der Spiegel magazine reported.
And Le Parisien wrote that Lubitz was “obsessed” with the area of the crash scene in the southern Alps and had flown in a glider over the area where the Airbus 320 went down.
“Andreas took part in a training course with my niece, who was a good friend of his, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region. I am certain that he knew the sector of the crash because he had flown over it in a glider,” Dieter Wagner, a member of Lubitz’s flying club, told the paper. “He was passionate about the Alps — obsessed even.” French police on Friday said they retrieved up to 600 pieces of human remains from the crash site but as yet no intact bodies.
And Lufthansa said it would offer 50,000 euros — about $54,500 — in immediate assistance to the families of each victim.
Additional reporting by Brigitte Stelzer