The details of the assassination itself are known: On 18 March 1913, several months after capturing Thessaloniki from the Ottoman Empire during the First Balkan War, King George I was out for a late afternoon walk in the city and, as was his custom, lightly guarded.

Encountering George on the street near the White Tower, Schinas shot the king once in the back from close range with a revolver, killing him.

[2] He had two sisters, one older and one younger, and may have had a brother named Hercules who ran a chemist shop in Volos where Schinas may have worked as an assistant.

[6] The Greek consul general in New York suggested another explanation for Schinas's departure: that he was evading the police following the closure of the Center for Workingmen school in Volos.

[7] Contemporary newspaper articles and Greek government officials reported that in the years prior to the assassination, Schinas lived in New York City,[8] working at the Fifth Avenue and Plaza Hotels.

He studied socialism, frequented "radical circles"[9] in New York's Lower East Side, and distributed copies of English socialist Robert Blatchford's Merrie England to his co-workers at the Plaza Hotel.

[6] According to post-assassination press and government reports, about three weeks before the assassination, he traveled from Athens to Volos, then to Thessaloniki, possibly begging[10] and "subsisting almost entirely on milk".

"[15] The Greek Minister of Justice stated that Schinas stayed at the house of a local lawyer until he was kicked out over a dispute involving blackmail.

[16] By the time Schinas arrived in Thessaloniki in February 1913, King George I had been staying there for several months, planning a celebration of the city's liberation from the Ottomans in the First Balkan War.

Thirty years later, the "much-reviled"[17] Otto was overthrown, and Britain, France, and Russia, chose as his successor a 17-year-old Danish prince, who was approved by the Greek National Assembly and crowned "George I, King of the Hellenes".

[18] In pursuit of the Megali Idea ("Great Idea"), the irredentist belief that Ottoman-controlled Greek lands would be reclaimed and the Byzantine Empire restored, Greece recovered Volos and other parts of Thessaly in the 1881 Convention of Constantinople, but suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Greco-Turkish War in 1897 under the military leadership of George's eldest son, Crown Prince Constantine.

Against the urging of his advisers, the king refused to travel the city with a large number of guards; only two gendarmes were permitted to follow at a distance.

George and Frangoudis walked by the harbor near the White Tower, discussing the king's upcoming visit to the German battlecruiser Goeben.

[21] At approximately 5:15 p.m. on the corner of Vassilissis Olgas and Aghias Triadas streets,[22] Schinas shot George in the back at point-blank range with a revolver.

[24] Another version described Schinas emerging from a Turkish cafe called the "Pasha Liman", drunk and "ragged", and shooting George when he walked by.

Kathimerini also reported that Schinas gave depositions after his arrest but the transcripts were lost in a fire aboard a ship while being transported to Piraeus.

I let him walk by me and immediately, I fired.On 6 May 1913, six weeks after being arrested, Schinas died by falling thirty feet (nine meters) out of a window from the gendarmerie's Examining Magistrate office in Thessaloniki.

[36] In the ensuing years, division between Constantine and Venizelos led to the National Schism,[37] a civil conflict some historians suggest might have been avoided if the popular King George I had not been assassinated by Schinas.

[38] Although remembered as one of the early 20th century's "famous anarchist assassins" such as Luigi Lucheni and Leon Czolgosz, the historical record of Schinas's motivations is inconclusive.

[39] Prominent conspiracy theories suggested the assassin was an agent of the Ottomans, the Bulgarians, the Dual Alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary,[c] or Macedonian nationalists.

[53] Writing in 2014, Michael Newton described the gendarmerie's torture of Schinas as producing "a confused confession that mixed anarchist sentiments with a claim that 'he had killed the King because he refused to give him money.

[55] Kemp wrote, "Rather than being part of a wider conspiracy, whether political or enacted by a state, Alexandros Schinas may have simply been a sick man (both mentally and physically) seeking an escape from the harsh realities of the early twentieth century.