“She won’t get away with anything!” A mother tried in court for the murder of her newborn baby

It is a painful case that the Dordogne Assize Court must examine from this Thursday, January 23. A very young woman is accused of having killed the child she had just given birth to at Bergerac station in 2022.

The facts date back to April 29, 2022 in the afternoon. That day, a cleaning lady was responsible for cleaning traces of blood in the disabled toilets at Bergerac station. It is she who discovers the body of an infant in the toilet bowl, barely covered with toilet paper. On site, the police discovered remains of the placenta, blood and a cut umbilical cord, attesting that the child had just been born shortly before the events.

An autopsy carried out by the Bordeaux forensic medicine center revealed that the male child was viable, did not appear particularly premature and had breathed before dying.cardiorespiratory failure in a context of submersion“.

The investigation opened by the prosecution was entrusted to the Bergerac police station. Very quickly, investigators traced the mother and her companion, the presumed father of the child who was with her at the time of the incident. On May 5, less than a week after the discovery of the body, the couple was arrested. Placed in pre-trial detention, he will be quickly indicted. Their criminal record is clean.

The mother, a Bergerac resident, was very young at the time. She is only 19 years old. Indicted for murder of a minor under 15 years old, she admits before the judge of freedoms and detention to having known that she was pregnant, admits to having given birth and to having had “aware on the day of the events that her child was born alive” according to the terms used at the time by the public prosecutor.

Facts for which she faces life imprisonment.

The reality is that this file is above all a file of distress.

Me Réda Hammouche,

lawyer for the accused (Périgueux bar)

According to the lawyer, “cis a young woman, 19 years old at the time of the events, we must not forget, who finds herself caught in the jaws of something that she never anticipated, that she perhaps also has at one moment refused to see.“

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Her partner at the time, then aged 41, was prosecuted for “voluntary failure to prevent a crime and failure to assist a 15-year-old in danger”. For this, he risks a sentence of seven years in detention and a fine of 100,000 euros. But according to his statements and the assertions of the young mother he accompanied, although present in front of the toilet at the time of the events, he would not have been aware of the scene which took place there.

As for the accused’s line of defense, “she will not exonerate herself from anything”, says her lawyer today. “She doesn’t make excuses, which makes it all the more for me that she deserves to understand what could have happened to her.”. The hearing will take place over four days, from Thursday January 23 until Tuesday January 28, before the Dordogne Assize Court, in Périgueux.