the essential
The verdict is expected today. The two accused, one of whom stabbed the victim twice, face up to 15 years in prison.
Leather cowboy boots, black jeans, salt and pepper hair like Renaud in his heyday… Jean-François is a biker, a real one. Since he was very young, he has been passionate about two wheels. It was on the handlebars of a motorcycle that he left his native Belgium and a difficult childhood towards France, as a teenager. He landed in Toulouse where he took on numerous jobs, supporting people with disabilities, construction and others. Then he moved to Rieupeyroux where he has worked for several years. And always with his motorbike.
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He was stabbed “for nothing” in Rieupeyroux: the trial of immaturity before the criminal court of Aveyron
This August 12, 2022, he took it out to go to Villefranche-de-Rouergue. After a last coffee and a cigarette at a friend’s house, he prepares to return home around 1:40 a.m. He will not have time to cross the door of his garage when two young people apprehend him. One of them, Keith, 23 years old at the time, wants to know why he would have followed his girlfriend on the road. She was the one who told him. Jean-François does not answer, feels that things are going to turn sour. He tries to flee but is caught. He receives the first blows on his helmet, with the butt of a weapon, an alarm pistol. Then he receives two stab wounds. One will hit his liver, the other will perforate his spleen and require an emergency operation at the Villefranche-de-Rouergue hospital, then his transfer to Toulouse.
Two years later, doctors estimated that he had lost 5% of his abilities. We can live without a spleen say experts, the organ serving above all to avoid infections…
“You are not responsible for anything: you are a victim”
Yesterday, facing his attackers, Jean-François had to testify about his attack and deliver his version. The court had listened, before that, to his distress call, short of breath, to the firefighters at 1:47 a.m…. He was bleeding a lot, felt himself leaving but had “not realized that he had received blows from knife “. This is common with adrenaline.
For the rest, the one who was 56 years old at the time, will not say much more. At the helm, he is silent, nervous. “It’s not easy, it’s stressful. I was attacked and I was unable to defend myself,” he confides. Above all, he still asks himself this question: “What if I hadn’t flashed the headlights to this lady? “. What if she hadn’t called her boyfriend, who was particularly drunk that evening and who lived only 300 meters from Jean-François? “And if, what if: with this, we remake the world. Sir, you are not responsible for anything. You are a victim. When someone flashes your headlights at you, it doesn’t end with stabbings! », reminded him the president, Charles Pinarel, before questioning him about the statements of the two accused. “They say what they want,” he replied, before sitting down again. Alone, in the front row of the benches of the civil party.
“It went so fast…”
In the afternoon, Keith, detained in Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone since the events, spoke about the reasons for this violence. He spoke “honestly”, as he repeated several times when faced with questions from the judges. He explained that at the time, he “lived like in a movie, in the countryside.” That if the courts had not offered him a reprieve and had incarcerated him in 2019 for a first case of violence with a weapon, “he would perhaps have become aware of what violence really entailed. But in correctional, it’s not like here: we don’t go into details… I felt above everything, I was slipping through the cracks.”
So, that night of August 12, 2022, when his girlfriend called him to tell him that she was being followed by a biker and that she was in danger, “the alcohol got to me”. A “scenario was written” in his head: that of a predator prowling in Rieupeyroux… “You played Zoro! “, summed up the president, annoyed, yesterday. And to recall that “everything could have stopped after the insults. Everything could have stopped after the first blows. Why go as far as stabbing, I don’t understand the thing! “.
The accused replied that he wanted to “explain himself first but that everything happened very quickly”. He had the knife “always with him, in a bag”, but he had “not planned to take it out”. And as on the first day of the trial, he ends up “apologizing”: “At the time, I did not call the police or the gendarmerie. I wanted to do justice but I was wrong, I was wrong about the victim, she had done nothing… I apologize. When I got home, I told myself that I had done something stupid. If he had died, I would not have stood and I will not be in front of you today.” He faces 15 years of criminal imprisonment. The verdict is expected during the day.
This morning, the general advocate, Mathilde Jayais, will deliver her submissions. Against Keith, but also against his co-defendant, Jay, who accompanied him that evening and admitted to having punched the biker’s helmet.
