The editorial team advises you
On May 2, 2023, around 3:30 p.m., a 13-year-old schoolgirl was walking along the Saint-Angel alley in Mont-de-Marsan. She will join her sister and her mother after leaving college. She is “focused on her phone” and is not paying particular attention to this white car that has just passed her and parked on the sidewalk.
DNA and bumper piece
A man comes out and pretends to look for something in his trunk. The teenager overtakes the vehicle. The man belts her from behind with one hand placed over her mouth. He tries to immobilize it with a roll of reinforced tape. The schoolgirl manages to free herself and scream, which alerts a couple of walkers.
The attacker gets back into his vehicle alone and flees with the tailgate open. In his haste, he abandoned the roll of tape, but he hit a lamp post, leaving a piece of bumper behind.
“The police worked well,” said the president of the investigating chamber this Tuesday. The DNA profile that they noted on the piece of tape coincides with that of another kidnapping attempt, which took place thirteen years earlier in Pau.
The procedure was the same. A vehicle which parks, the 21-year-old young woman who passes it, is surrounded from behind and owes her salvation only to the fact of having struggled. For lack of other evidence than unknown DNA discovered on a piece of tape, the case was closed without further action. Until May 2023.
“A major trauma” for the two complainants
Even thirteen years apart, the two victims present “a greater degree of impact and psychological destabilization”. “The trauma is major and absolutely not calmed by the years,” confirms Me Thierry Sagardoytho for the young woman attacked in 2010 in Pau. She was “upset” by the events of 2023, “even more frightening” and which “reactivated her trauma”. The civil party supports the requests for continued detention of a man who acted “with the aim of predation”.
“Sexual urges”
The piece of bumper will lead the judicial police investigators to tighten their grip. It comes from a white Ford Focus from 2014, of which only 63 examples are identified in Landes. On June 6, 2023, a suspect was arrested in Mont-de-Marsan, a sawmill worker whose DNA “matched” with the two pieces of tape.
The thirty-year-old, father of two children, separated from his wife and “in a common law relationship” with another woman, will end up recognizing the attempted kidnappings, citing “sexual urges”, linked to “his addictions to pornography” and to his alcohol consumption. He claims he himself was “horrified” by his actions and would not have gone any further.
Advocate General Pascal Bouvier doubts this and points to “a major risk of renewal of the facts”, aggravated by “the structural perversity” noted by the expert psychiatrist. In defense, Me Valérie Boillot notes that the man “only very sporadically has access to a psychologist in detention” and therefore cannot carry out “this necessary work on himself”. Decision on July 5.
