A woman was sentenced Wednesday at the Pas-de-Calais assizes to 18 years in prison for killing her baby who she had just given birth to on a TGV in 2021, AFP learned from her lawyer.
An SNCF maintenance worker found the infant dead, abandoned in a bloody toilet trash can in a TGV which had just completed a journey from Lille to Marseille.
According to autopsy and expert reports, this male child was born at full term, “alive and viable”, according to his mother’s indictment order. His death was due to a combination of “mechanical asphyxia”, head trauma, hypothermia and lack of care after birth, according to these reports.
Now aged 43, the mother, residing in Pas-de-Calais and already known to the courts for minor crimes, was quickly identified thanks in particular to genetic analyzes of the baby, then arrested.
Neither mental illness nor substance use disorder nor a level of intelligence below average was detected during the investigation in this woman, who admitted to having suffocated the child just after his birth, in a state of extreme panic.
She had hidden her pregnancy, and even her childbirth, from her partner, the baby’s father, who had traveled with her on the TGV. She explained to investigators that she was afraid that he would leave her if she had a child with him.
If the verdict is below the 25 years of imprisonment required by the public prosecutor, the mother’s lawyer, Me Benoît Cousin, considered that the sentence was “extremely disappointing” and “unnecessarily severe”, because his client “does not is not dangerous” and could “reintegrate” into society.
“She is a lady who built herself on an extremely damaged life story” and several expert reports showed that she had had an “alteration of discernment” at the time of the events, declared Me Cousin to the AFP, specifying that its client will appeal.
