The trial of Amandine's mother, accused of having tortured and left the 13-year-old girl to die of hunger, opened this Monday, January 20, 2025 before the Montpellier Assize Court. This hearing, among the many terrible mysteries of this case, raises a question: how could no one put an end to the martyrdom of this child even though reports had been made, 6 years earlier, by her school in Perpignan?
Looking for more than a second on the photo of Amandine at the time of her death in August 2020 is strictly impossible. Unbearable. A 13-year-old girl weighing 28 kg and 1.55 m tall. Subjected to barbarism for several months in the family home in Hérault, sequestered at the bottom of a storage room, sometimes naked, often in the dark. Spied on by the video surveillance system installed by her mother and starved to death.
How to explain the unthinkable? How did we miss the hell experienced by Amandine, despite all the signals and all the reports made on suspicion of abuse from her early childhood in the Pyrénées-Orientales?
At that time, the little girl lived with her family in the department where her father came from, she attended the Jules-Ferry school in Perpignan. Already, note the school staff, the little girl is stealing food. A behavior so striking that during the year 2013-2014, when she was between 7 and 8 years old, the teaching team drafted worrying information addressed to the public prosecutor's office. “Throughout the year, we noticed that she was stealing snacks from her friends.” she writes. After also surprising her, “eating leftover snacks from the trash.”
The mother sends a medical certificate to the school and the little girl never comes back
Still in CE1, Amandine arrives with bruises and traces of blows on her body. The director is moved and a medical assessment reveals bruises of “19 cm high by 13.5 cm wide on one knee”, “10 cm by 12 cm on the other knee”but also on each foot, on the buttock, on the forearm and on the shoulder. When questioned, the child explains that she was placed on her knees on a wooden ruler for several hours when she was punished. Then she retracts. An investigation is opened which will result in no further action being taken. “lack of sufficient information”. The children's judge, as in 2012 for the first time, was contacted and concluded that there was no need for educational assistance. After summoning the parents by the school doctor, the little girl will not return to Jules-Ferry school, her mother sending a medical certificate specifying that her daughter suffers from an illness causing the bruises as well as hair loss. .
At home, silence is required. Amandine's brothers and sisters do not dare to speak or are forced to lie to social services “out of fear” for themselves, to be separated or “so that Amandine is not hit again.” Everyone will end up confiding that from the age of 2, she was “the painkiller” or “the ugly duckling of the family”, never participating in family outings or being the only one excluded from going on vacation. That his mother “hated her because she looked a lot like her father.” She endured “more than all the others” food deprivation, traumatic corrections, punching and kicking, hair pulling, strangulation, etc.
-“Two days without eating or drinking”
Between 2017 and 2020, the teenager will change schools three times, first at Notre Dame des Anges college in Espira-de-l'Agly in 6th grade, she goes to Montpellier in 5th grade and to Sigean in 4th grade as internal. In Hérault too, staff noticed the marks on her body which she clumsily tried to justify. And that's not all, several of the schoolgirl's classmates alerted her following her confessions, but Amandine always denies them. No longer taking any classes during the first confinement and no longer returning from May 7, 2020. Definitely delivered to her unspeakable ordeal.
Humiliation and food punishment, contained by the social bond of school, intensify behind closed doors at home. “At first, she was deprived of meals in the evening. Then at lunchtime and in the evening, then locked in her room for two days without eating or drinking,” reveals a close friend. Amandine, pushed aside at the end of the table, limited to meals based on green vegetables that she doesn't like when the others enjoy copious menus, is soon excluded. Forbidden to eat. Forced to write lines a stone's throw from the plates and to stay at the bottom of a storage room, in the sole company of a freezer, to further torment the hunger that torments her.
“In hindsight, it would have been difficult to avoid it. No one could have imagined that.”
Amandine's father Frédéric Florès, a police officer in Perpignan, who had two other children with the accused Sandrine Pissara, also said nothing during the social investigations carried out in the Pyrénées-Orientales. He explains having witnessed punishments from a “other age” and tantrums on the part of the mother but never violence. “Sandrine Pissara hid them from her. She manipulated the whole family to ensure that they contested the accusations and that everyone supported her lies. And Mr. Florès was convinced that she was incapable of doing that to Amandine,” specifies his lawyer Me Florian Médico who has been speaking out since the hearing opened. “In hindsight, it would have been very difficult to avoid it. This father relayed his convictions to social services. The judicial institution did not have the elements to be aware of what was happening. No one could imagine that. And six years later, we find ourselves in absolute tragedy, with acts of torture and barbarity.”
A pain all the more profound since Frédéric Florès had not seen his children for three years before the events despite, he said, his regular requests to their mother. “Sandrine Pissarra had convinced the children that he did not want to see them when he had no other wish. His last contact with Amandine was in April 2020, for 45 minutes on the phone. They had discussed what they could do to see each other again“. Without the father, even if he knew his daughter was unhappy, he confides, could not assume that she was in danger.
Today, Frédéric Flores has only one expectation. “May Amandine's memory be respected and may the accused recognize the torture they inflicted on her. Hoping that Sandrine Pissara's manipulations will not affect the jurisdiction as has been the case in the past.”
