Eight years in prison were requested on Friday in Le Mans against a 31-year-old woman accused of having given medical alcohol to her premature baby when he was in hospital in 2023, causing him serious after-effects.
• Also read: Trial in France: life prison requested against Amandine’s mother, who died of starvation
Tried since Thursday by the Sarthe criminal court for administering a harmful substance to a minor under 15 years of age followed by permanent disability, the mother faces a maximum sentence of fifteen years in prison.
The child, aged six months at the time, was hospitalized at the end of January 2023 in intensive care following discomfort. Premature and suffering from complications, he was fed via a nasogastric tube.
Despite this care, the baby suffered a series of illnesses whose origins the doctors did not understand, until an analysis revealed an incredibly high level of ethanol in the child’s blood: 7.81 g/l of blood. According to Guillaume Drevin, medical biologist, this is “the highest concentration of ethanol recorded in an infant”, which put him at risk of death.
The medical team immediately made a report to the public prosecutor and suspicion fell on the mother, “always there at the time of the illness”, as General Advocate Marie-Agnès Joly recalled.
In police custody, the mother began by denying, admitting at one point to having introduced 70-degree medical alcohol found on a nursing trolley into the child’s catheter.
-She then retracted her statements and told the court on Friday: “I didn’t do anything, I’m sure of it. »
According to the psychologist expert who assessed her, the accused, fifth of a family of ten children, presents a slight intellectual disability. Abandoned by her father, mistreated by her stepfather and victim of incest, she spent time in foster families and homes for disabled people, also spending several stays in psychiatry for depression.
“She is a polytraumatized woman,” summarized the expert on Thursday, estimating that she suffers in particular from “Münchhausen syndrome by delegation”.
According to the French Society of Emergency Medicine, Münchhausen syndrome by proxy is a factitious disorder simulated and/or induced by a parent.
The baby, who was the victim of numerous alcoholic comas, had to undergo partial removal of the stomach, damaged by alcohol. Now two and a half years old, he is exclusively tube-fed and suffers from significant developmental delay.
The verdict is expected Friday evening.
