“We had already told them to stop being stupid,” a security guard tells his colleague. This Thursday, at the Passage du Havre shopping center in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, the accident the day before is at the heart of all the discussions.
This Wednesday, around 1:30 p.m., a group of young boys stroll through the shopping arcade, located near the Saint-Lazare station. One of them, aged only 11, then grabbed the handrail of the escalator, according to several testimonies collected on site. He would have let himself be carried into the void by the latter which rises at the same time as the escalator.
“People were shouting at him stop, stop! », says an employee of one of the brands installed in front of the escalator in question. It was when arriving at the top of the escalator that the child would have stumbled on the balustrade which surrounds the corridor of the upper floor. “And he fell,” says another employee of the shopping center. They measured this morning, it’s a little over 5 m…”
The boy does not fall onto the tiles of the shopping arcade. Just below the escalator is a table surrounded by bar stools. “He fell on one of these stools,” said several employees. “It made a loud noise and then we heard him screaming for two or three minutes. » The boy suffers from multiple fractures. “He fell on the pool,” recalls a witness.
As a crowd formed around the child, emergency services were quickly notified. “After a while, there was a lady who came to take care of him,” says one of them. According to our information, his grandmother was in the shopping center when the accident occurred, it could be her. “I don’t know if she knew him, but she stayed with him from start to finish, she eventually reassured him and he stopped screaming. The firefighters gave him medication to ease the pain, but he was conscious. »
In total, the rescue operation lasted more than an hour and a half in Passage du Havre. The child was finally transported in serious condition to Robert-Debré hospital in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. He was conscious at the time of his evacuation from the Parisian shopping center, however, according to the police headquarters, his vital prognosis was in jeopardy. The evolution of his state of health is unknown this Thursday.
Still according to the police headquarters, the child decided to reproduce the scene from a video published on a social network, according to our information, it was TikTok. A sequence that we have not been able to find.
