The driver of the car involved in a serious accident that left four people dead on the night of Sunday to Monday in Doubs was drunk. “The driver of the car, aged 41, was drunk at the time of the accident: he had 1.6 g of alcohol per litre of blood,” said the public prosecutor of Besançon, Étienne Manteaux.
According to the first elements of the investigation, the four men had left a bar-game-karting complex in Besançon around midnight. “They had filmed a video of themselves partying in the car,” the magistrate noted.
The very violent accident was spotted at around 1:30 a.m., but it could have happened earlier on this departmental road leading into Saône, a town in the Besançon metropolitan area where the four victims, aged 32 to 54, lived.
“The speed at which they were driving at the time of the accident is indeed that of the speedometer, which was stuck at 180 km/h,” added Étienne Manteaux, specifying that the narcotics tests had however come back negative.
An accident of unprecedented violence
The magistrate specified the nationalities of the victims: they were not four Brazilians as initially announced, but three Brazilians and one Cape Verdean. The victims lived in Saône and three of these men worked in public works. The fourth, the youngest, had arrived more recently and was looking for work. “The accident is not related to their work. They lived 200 meters from the scene of the accident, with the wife and child of one of them,” Benoît Vuillemin, mayor of the town, told AFP.
The accident was of unheard-of violence: the car, a Volkswagen Passat, left the road and “cut a tree 1.04 m in diameter”, the prosecutor had already indicated on Monday. The autopsies of the four victims confirmed deaths directly linked to the accident: the four men died of hemorrhages and spinal fractures.
