“HRD killer”: the “cold and determined revenge of an intelligent man”, the mute Gabriel Fortin

Three murders and one attempted murder committed in the space of forty-eight hours at the end of January 2021 in Haut-Rhin, Drôme and Ardèche. So at the time of his trial, which opens this Tuesday, June 13 in Valence (Drôme) for three weeks, the question arises: “the HRD killer”, so nicknamed because of the profession of three of his victims, will he open his lips?

Tracking carried out months or even years before it took action

Even if he exercises his right to silence, the Assize Court of Drôme has elements to judge the springs of the paranoid and murderous drift of Gabriel Fortin, a lonely bachelor, without children or friends. Rather than those of a downgraded victim of the economic crisis and unemployment, whom the confinements imposed by the Covid and the Yellow Vests movement would have pushed to the limit, his many writings, found in his digital media, reveal his acts like “the cold and determined revenge of an intelligent man, wounded by unbearable rejections”, asserts the accusation.

The logic that he invokes in notes written in prison is that of a sort of “delayed self-defense”, a “reaction to kill in order not to die”, “a gesture of survival” so as not to “become a wreck “, Considers the ex-unemployed at the end of rights, who says he prefers” an extremely heavy criminal conviction “to” social forfeiture “. “Fear must change sides”, he also writes, walled in certainties with conspiratorial accents. “An undoubtedly premeditated journey”, considers the accusation, which is based on the traces of the multiple locations he carried out months or even years before his passage to the act, the chronology of which has been carefully reconstructed.

Gabriel Fortin’s first crime took place on January 26, 2021, a little before 6 p.m., in the parking lot of the Knauf company, in Wolfgantzen (Haut-Rhin). Estelle Luce, 39, the author of the 2006 internship report, works there as director of human resources and is preparing to return home. “I’m leaving,” she announces to her daughter when the killer appears at the door of his BMW and fires four times. In September 2020, the investigation will show, Gabriel Fortin had photographed the parking area where his future victim used to park. No one saw or heard anything.

“I hope he finally speaks (during trial). If I don’t believe it, no one will believe it for me,” says Céline Luce, Estelle Luce’s older sister. She would like “to know, for example, if she saw him arrive, if she tried to escape, if she had time to talk to him” or even “to recognize him and understand his gesture”.

At the wheel of the red Hyundai that he rented in Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), where he resided at the time, Gabriel Fortin set off again in stride towards Wattwiller, near Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin). Around 6:45 p.m., he rang at the home of Bertrand Meichel, his weapon hidden under a pizza box. The former HRD of the Francel company, from which Fortin had been dismissed for misconduct fifteen years earlier, miraculously escaped the shot that rang out.

The two men fight. The assailant took refuge in his car and fled, abandoning his glasses, his cap and a surgical mask. In the dark, Bertrand Meichel did not recognize the ex-engineer. He is still unaware that he is also the author of the smear campaign on social networks of which Estelle Luce and he were the target via false profiles at the time of the shock confessions of the former HRD “with a thousand dismissals” , Didier Bille.

After “unexplained detours” in the Paris region, which suggest that other people (two lawyers and an ex-girlfriend) have escaped his vengeful aims, Gabriel Fortin arrives in Valence (Drôme). On January 28, 2021, at 8:52 a.m., an employee of the Pôle emploi Victor-Hugo agency opened the door for him. Immediately afterwards, in an office on the ground floor, a gunshot and a cry ring out. Patricia Pasquion, 54, responsible for compensation, collapses, fatally injured in the chest.

“Why did he shoot her, and only her? Would he have identified her as a known face during a location scouting in October 2020? How did the hatred he had for HRDs then spread to Pôle emploi and the courts? “, asks Me Hervé Gerbi, lawyer for the sisters of the adviser, whom these questions haunt. “The catharsis of the hearing can act on him, you never know,” says Me Denis Dreyfus, who reports that Fortin’s silence only “increased the hatred that (his) clients”, the husband and the two daughters of Patricia Pasquion, “nurture towards him”.

Five kilometers and nine minutes later, his right hand stuffed in a plastic bag, Gabriel Fortin enters Faun Environnement, a manufacturer of garbage trucks where he worked as a mechanical engineer before being laid off in 2009. ‘humiliate,’ he wrote about the letter signed at the time by HRD Géraldine Caclin and received on December 24.

He regrets the low media coverage of his story

Fortin claims to have an appointment with her and chases her into an office before killing her with two shots, one of which is at close range. Entitled “PB Faun”, one of its computer files will suggest surveillance carried out on the company’s site from 2014. at the prosecutor’s office. Is this where Gabriel Fortin was heading when he hit a police vehicle while crossing a bridge that brought him back to the city center?

In one of his notes written in prison, reports Me Hervé Gerbi, Gabriel Fortin regrets the low media coverage of his story. “Perhaps, hopes the lawyer, that the media coverage of his trial will encourage him to speak out” and to dissipate the last gray areas of a bloody raid that was undoubtedly unfinished.