On the fourth day of the trial of Amandine's mother, Sandrine Pissarra, and her stepfather, Jean-Michel Cros, a boarding school supervisor at the last college attended by the teenager, in Sigean (Aude), told this evening of Monday March 16, 2020, when President Emmanuel Macron announced the confinement of the country the next day, in the face of Covid.
“The boys jumped for joy, it was the holidays. Amandine collapsed to the ground. She said to me: 'Lola, I'm going to die. How long will this last? I'm not going to last' “.
“She repeated it over and over, she cried, she couldn’t breathe,” reports the 28-year-old young woman.
The next day, Amandine returns home. But she does not return to classes in May, when a two-month forced isolation is lifted. Most of the time locked in a storage room, deprived of food, severely beaten by her mother, the schoolgirl died less than three months later.
On August 6, 2020, the day of her death from cardiac arrest and sepsis, at the family home in Montblanc (Hérault), near Béziers, the schoolgirl only weighed 28 kg and was 1.55 m tall.
If her mother admitted on Tuesday evening, for the first time, the “acts of torture or barbarity” for which she faces life imprisonment, she had a lot of difficulty on Thursday to specify what exactly she recognized.
“Slaps, yes. Pulling my hair, that happened to me,” she concedes in a thin voice, much more verbose when it comes to evoking the violence she herself would have suffered from from his mother. “Going to sleep on an empty stomach, I know what it’s like,” insists Sandrine Pissarra: Amandine “ate what she wanted.”
In her storage room, “she was starving!”, reprimands the president of the court, Eric Emmanuelidis. “Did you want her to die?”
“No, whatever you want, except that,” persists the mother.
“Private concentration camp”
Also questioned on Thursday, his partner at the time risks up to 30 years in prison for having “deprived his stepdaughter of care or food” and having done nothing to save her.
-“Before confinement, if we ate fries, she (Amandine, editor’s note) had green beans or celery,” explained Jean-Michel Cros.
Then the deprivations and punishments worsen, without this man, unanimously described as benevolent by those around him, but submissive to his partner, daring to put an end to them. “Yes, it has become commonplace. In the long run, it sets in, we get used to it,” he tries to explain to Mr. Emmanuelidis, who evokes the concept of “banality of evil” developed by the philosopher Hannah Arendt about the Nazi regime.
As if echoing the images of the concentration camps, the magistrate then screens screenshots of the cameras that were monitoring Amandine in the storage room.
In the first, the teenager appears naked, already very emaciated, kneeling on a roll of linoleum, her hands behind her back. In the second, taken from the front, she is still naked and even thinner. A disjointed puppet, she leans on a piece of furniture, her legs crossed in an unnatural position.
Jean-Michel Cros assures that he had never seen these images: “How can you do that to a child, it’s disgusting, inhumane,” he says, repeating that he didn’t realize you're welcome, that he doesn't understand why it didn't catch his eye, that it should have, that he was under the control of his partner, that he had started drinking again, that he “would give her life” so that Amandine come back.
Addressing Sandrine Pissarra at the end of the hearing, Me Laurent Epailly, on behalf of “La Voix de l'enfant”, one of the four associations to have filed as civil parties, told her that she had created his “small private concentration camp”, establishing “forced labor to the point of exhaustion”.
“The hunger, the abuse, the lack of care, the dehumanization, the absence of hope and the lack of love: you are monstrously guilty,” he insisted.
The prosecution's indictment and the defense's pleadings will take place on Friday. The court will then retire to deliberate.
