After less than 24 hours at the bishopric, at the headquarters of the Marseille judicial police, this 39-year-old woman “quickly recognized the facts”, explained Sunday evening the public prosecutor of Marseille Dominique Laurens, in a detailed press release.
“At first”, the mother would have first “hit her son in the apartment” family, Friday, the day she had reported his “disappearance”. Then she would have “taken him to the ravine” (Editor’s note: on the edge of the Huveaune) where the lifeless body was to be found on Saturday by the child’s father and uncle.
It was “on the spot” that she would then have killed him, “using a knife taken from the kitchen”, specifies the magistrate, stressing that the child had “died in the afternoon on Friday , even before the report of his disappearance”.
The explanations of the mother, who declared to have “returned shortly afterwards (to the edge of the Huveaune) to get rid of belongings”, match the “elements collected (…) both at her home and along the banks” of the river, as well as images from video surveillance cameras, insisted Ms. Laurens.
Before discovering the body of the child, Saturday at midday, down a steep slope overlooking the water, in tall grass and brush, his father and uncle had first found his jacket , at 08:30 in the morning, a hundred meters away, also on the banks of the Huveaune, in the popular district of Capelette.
– A woman “who loved life” –
The custody of the mother, from Saturday evening, had been motivated by the first findings of the technical and scientific police in the apartment, which apparently left little doubt on the thesis of infanticide.
To the investigators, the mother spoke of “the crises” from which her 11-year-old son, autistic, suffered, explaining that “she could no longer manage the situation”: “That day”, Friday, she “estimated that it would never end”, details the magistrate in her press release.
Saturday, at the scene of the tragedy, after the discovery of the body, the child’s aunt and uncle and neighbors explained to AFP their research all Friday night, until 3 a.m., then again all Saturday morning until the tragic outcome.
According to them, the mother had explained to them on Friday that her son had escaped her around 4:00 p.m., after a walk. Disappearance which had been reported to the nearest police station, the same day, from 5:00 p.m.
“I didn’t expect it to be my sister,” reacted to AFP the child’s aunt, acknowledging “thinking” and “pacing” since the day before. “She was very protective of this child, she fought” for him, she assured about her sister, recalling “her youth as a good living, a funny young woman, who loved life”.
“The whole family has lost two people who were very dear to us,” she insisted, oscillating between incomprehension and the desire to understand this gesture.
As of Saturday, the forties had explained that her sister, separated from her husband, took care “full time” of her son, her only child, and did not exercise a profession: “I had tried to help him to that she be accompanied by specialized institutions, but that had failed”.
The mother’s police custody has been extended and she will be presented to an investigating judge on Monday, with a view to “opening a judicial investigation into the count of murder of a 15-year-old minor”, said the prosecutor. .
