Later Life
While doing his obligatory community service (Zivildienst) in a West German hospital in 1989, Rust stabbed a female co-worker who had rejected him. The victim barely survived. He was convicted of attempted manslaughter, sentenced to two and a half years in prison and released after having served fifteen months. Since then he has lived a fragmented life, describing himself as a "bit of an oddball." After being released from court, he converted to Hinduism in 1996 to become engaged to a daughter of an Indian tea merchant. In 2001, he was convicted for stealing a cashmere pullover and ordered to pay DM 10,000; the sentence was later reduced to 600 marks. A further brush with the law came in 2005, when he was convicted of fraud and had to pay €1,500 for stolen goods. In 2009 Rust described himself as a professional poker player. Most recently, in 2012, he describes himself as an analyst at a Zurich based investment bank.
Read more about this topic: Mathias Rust
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“In time, after a dozen years of centering their lives around the games boys play with one another, the boys’ bodies change and that changes everything else. But the memories are not erased of that safest time in the lives of men, when their prime concern was playing games with guys who just wanted to be their friendly competitors. Life never again gets so simple.”
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“The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough.... He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.”
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