The Moselle Assize Court sentenced a man to thirty years of criminal imprisonment on Thursday for killing and burning the man his ex-partner was seeing in November 2021 in Florange (Moselle). Mathieu Courneroux, 40, had killed Fabrice Neumetzler out of jealousy, by breaking his skull with an iron bar, before placing his body in his car, moving it to an isolated location and setting it on fire. He was convicted of murder, altering the inventory of the scene of a crime and destruction of another’s property by dangerous means.
The jurors and judges, however, against the advice of the attorney general, dismissed the conviction for murder, which is more serious and requires premeditation. In the fall of 2021, his partner Aurélie S., with whom he describes a “passionate relationship” seventeen years old, leaves him. He can’t stand it. For weeks, he broods, to the point “to instill in his mind hatred against the one who stole Aurélie from him”said Alexandre Bernard, lawyer for the civil parties. Mathieu Courneroux then told them “live in hell”.
“Desecration of the body”
And on November 20, 2021, he killed Fabrice Neumetzler with a «violence barbare»denounced the attorney general Agnès Cordier, an act coupled with a “desecration of the body making the crime even more heinous”. “He justifies his actions with love, but love has nothing to do with it.”argued Alexandre Bernard. “Mathieu Courneroux is the story of a man who falls at every level without the slightest anchor”argued Ulysse Gobert, the accused’s lawyer.
The attorney general had requested a sentence of twenty-five years of criminal imprisonment with a two-thirds security period, a ban on carrying a weapon for five years, deprivation of family rights for six years and socio-judicial monitoring with an injunction for treatment for eight years.
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