On the second day of her appeal trial in Aix-en-Provence, Nadine Oliveira, driver of the school bus involved in the fatal accident in Millas, reaffirmed that “the barriers were open”. She is on trial for the deaths of six children in 2017. The court is seeking to understand the exact circumstances of this tragedy.
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“The barriers were open,” repeated Nadine Oliveira, Tuesday October 8 at the bar of the Aix-en-Provence court, during the second day of her appeal trial for the fatal accident of the school bus she was driving in Millas (Pyrénées-Orientales) on a level crossing. “I appealed because the barriers were lifted“, assured Nadine Oliveira, 55, still in a black suit. Considered responsible for the death of six children in this accident where 17 other schoolchildren were injured, she was sentenced to five years in prison, including one year, in first instance.
The court reconstructed Nadine Oliveira’s entire day on December 14, 2017, in order to try to understand what could have led to the accident. On that day, the anniversary of his father’s death, could he have altered his concentration? Or even a “seduction game” with a colleague with whom she exchanged 95 text messages, her phone being placed right next to her, very visible?
Nadine Oliveira assures us that no: she knew the route between Millas college and St Feliu d’Avall by heart, was “no hurry“, and had, like every day, “walks around the bus in the morning“. The defendant denied that the “frenzy of SMS exchanges“, as the Advocate General described it, could have rendered it”little attention to the rules of conduct“. She admitted to having already violated the ban on telephone use while driving but only for “know at which stop [s]a girl” was waiting. A measure of “comfort“, noted an assessor, “since you would have seen what stop she was at without communicating before“.
The driver also admitted to “slipped a stop sign” at the end of the school. But she hammers it home: she had no warning of the passage of a train before the level crossing: no sound signal, no light signal, no closed barrier. In tears, she remembers the moment after the collision: “I wake up, I try to get up, I hear screams, children crying all around, suddenly I see that the bus is cut in two“.
Written with AFP.
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