“It is a dramatically simple file on the facts, but extremely complicated on the personality of Mr.”, summarizes Ms. Elena Badescu. This December 30, before the Bordeaux criminal court, the lawyer defended a 23-year-old man tried following a chilling journey, last November 9, on Quai Deschamps, in Bordeaux.
In a few minutes, Johan Monge attacked three people he did not know: two women and a police officer. Part of the scene was filmed by cameras from a car and from the Café du Port. Images broadcast to the audience.
On November 9, around 1:30 p.m., a student left a gym with a friend. They walk along the Café du Port, towards the stone bridge. A young man follows them. The couple stops at a pedestrian crossing, the stranger approaches, cocks his arm and delivers a violent blow to the young girl’s back. A stab. The victim staggers; his attacker fled. In the videos, we see him turn around and give the middle finger.
The rest takes place less than a hundred meters away, out of camera view. A woman walks her baby in a stroller; the stranger rushes at her, grabs her breasts and says: “I want to take you in a corner”. The attack was quickly stopped: alerted after the stabbing, police officers from the anti-crime brigade set out in pursuit. Caught by an agent, the young man tried to stab him, before being overpowered, not without difficulty. “He was in a state of intense anger. He was screaming that he wanted to slit women’s throats,” the police will later testify.
“Psychotic personality”
In front of his judges, Johan Monge recognizes himself in the videos, but claims to remember nothing. “I don’t know what happened. I woke up with my knife in my hand and the police behind me. It’s like a sleepwalking attack,” he mutters, his gaze fixed.
Two experts examined him and concluded that his judgment was impaired at the time of the events. “Psychotic or borderline personality”, according to the psychiatrist, young man who “alternates moments of presence and absence”, notes the psychologist, the defendant has already been convicted for the assault of a woman, in 2023, on the campus. There too, he spoke of a “sleepwalking attack”. At the time, he was an economics student.
A course that he only followed for a few months, before finding himself on the street and surviving in a tent, under the Saint-Jean bridge, his mother whom he had joined in France, after leaving Cameroon, no longer wishing to host it.
For his trial, none of his relatives made the trip. Civil party, the student he stabbed is present, “because it is important not to look down,” she explains, describing the repercussions of her attack. “Physically, it’s better, but psychologically, it remains strong. I went back to my parents, I missed more than a month of classes, I failed my exams. » For the police officer too, the facts led to “psychological destabilization”, underlines his lawyer, Me Sapata.
“In a brief moment, the lives of the three victims were turned upside down. For what ? There is no meaning,” insists prosecutor Sébastien Baumert, pointing to “facts of unspeakable seriousness”. The court followed its requisitions: found guilty of all the proceedings, Johan Monge was sentenced to three years in prison, five years of socio-judicial supervision and was kept in detention.
