Murder in Montaigu-de-Quercy: “You broke up a family”

“Our father was a joyful man happy to be alive, in love with his daughters and his grandchildren. A great pastry chef.” On the second day of the assize trial of Kenny Joséphine, 20, and Yohan Baali, 24, accused of having killed a retiree with an iron bar at his home in Montaigu-de-Quercy on June 12, 2022, the relatives of the victim spoke.

At the helm, his daughters, Nadège and Anaïs, speak with great dignity of their father’s recent retirement taken “in his new house (in November 2021, in Montaigu-de-Quercy), his haven of peace, as he said” . Deeply moved, Gilles Rey, one of the deceased’s three brothers, turned directly to the accused. “You have broken a family as well as your own, meditate on your actions,” he told them straight in the eyes.

A family also bruised by not “being able to see Alain Rey one last time before his funeral, his body being in too bad a condition”, underlined personality investigator Luce Clavières on Tuesday. A point which took on particular resonance when, after the “black holes”, the denials and confused versions of the accused heard and read during the day, President Marie Leclair projected the crime scene.

In a cathedral silence, in the absence of the civil parties invited to remain in the room of the lost steps, the raw truth imposes itself on the giant screens of the courtroom. The naked body, the bloody head of the victim, distorted by the multiple blows received on his skull: the image is unbearable. The jurors are pale, as are the defendants’ lawyers. The resumption of the debates, marked by the questioning of the suspects on the facts, now seems futile.

It does not prevent the lawyer of the civil parties from extracting from Kenny Joséphine, struggling to recognize being the author of the fatal blows, that the facts are a real carnage, a “butchery”, according to the confessions of the second accused, Y . Baali. “The photo of the crime scene and the statements of the pathologist who says that he was not able to count the number of fractures, given their number, you say that it is due to a fight between you and the victim, do not consider “Don’t you rather think it’s a killing?” asks Me Étienne Durand-Raucher. The accused then lets out a terse “yes”, making his defense quite obsolete when he took the floor to read a letter agreed to in the morning. A word deciphered with difficulty, as if he had not written it himself, showing his “remorse” and his “justifications”, which came like a hair in the soup after the testimony of the expert psychiatrist who examined him .

Far from making common cause, the defense clashed until the end. On the one hand, Me Amélie Villageon-Saboya, counsel for Yohan Baali, repeated that her client has always denied having participated in a burglary at Alain Rey’s house. The lawyer continued by explaining her client’s intervention, motivated solely by the desire to help his friend, Kenny Joséphine. According to him, he found himself in difficulty with the retiree after entering his room at 4 a.m. The retiree had, in fact, had time to shoot his burglar with a BB gun. Y. Baali has only admitted to having kicked Alain Rey to this day. “Why did you steal the gun? airsoft of the retiree while leaving the iron bar on the body?” asks the attorney general Manon Noël, obtaining little response from the person concerned. Did he want to erase the only trace which linked him to the crime? It will be up to the six jurors to decide.

On the other hand, Me Amélie Piazzon, counsel for K. Joséphine, went out of her way to emphasize that her client had instigated this burglary with Yohan and the neighbor of Alain Rey, a minor who has now been exonerated. The verdict is expected during the day, the accused face life imprisonment.