“Skin and bones”: Hungry, violence, humiliation… The ordeal of Amandine, who weighed 28 kg when she died at 13, judged this Monday

Accused of acts of torture and barbarism leading to death without intention of causing it, but also of acts of violence, Sandrine Pissarra (55 years old) will share the box, from this Monday at the Assize Court of Hérault , with Jean-Michel Cros, 50, accused of deprivation of care and food leading to death. They risk, respectively, life imprisonment and 30 years in prison.

Both will have to answer for the ordeal inflicted on Amandine, who died at the age of 13 in August 2020 in Montblanc (Hérault) when she weighed only 28 kg and was 1m55 tall. According to the investigation, she died of a cardiac arrest while she had been locked in a cellar for weeks. Internally before the confinement linked to the Covid epidemic, Amandine was forced to return, in March 2020, to her mother between Béziers and Montpellier. She will never come back to class again.

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“Exit from a concentration camp”

In the meantime, she experienced an ordeal which caused a magistrate, responsible for studying one of the couple's numerous requests for release, to say that Amandine “had nothing left but skin and bones”. “When we see the photos of Amandine, we have the impression that this little girl has just come out of a concentration camp.”

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Locked naked in a windowless storage room… The ordeal of Amandine, who died of starvation at 13, was filmed at length by her family's cameras

The young girl's mother and stepfather initially indicated that they had only noticed Amandine's weight loss a week before her death.

Deprived of visits from his children for three years, Frédéric Florès, Amandine's father, living in Perpignan, discovered his daughter's fate with horror. “When I saw his face, I saw the Holocaust, the concentration camps, death,” he told Le Figaro. He was indignant at the short release of the father-in-law in 2023. “It’s a double punishment and an insult to the memory of my daughter,” he confided. Finally, Jean-Michel Cros will not be judged free.

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Painful debates

On the basis of overwhelming testimonies, the investigation revealed “the deprivation of food, care, violence, humiliation” which were “the daily life of the last months of the teenager's life”, according to our colleagues from Midi Libre who specify that six months before her death, “Amandine's attending physician had not detected anything abnormal in his patient”.

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Amandine, died of starvation at 14 in Hérault: “I never believed it was suicide” says her friend Emmanuelle

According to her friends, Amandine was “radiant, sunny, close to others” even if she was sometimes “dark”. For her mother, she was “a liar, a thief who could not stand authority.”

Justice will deliver its verdict at the end of the week after debates which promise to be particularly painful in view of the fate reserved for the young girl.