SAndrine P. is a very small woman, very slender, whose features can barely be seen behind her long brown hair. A small woman with a small voice who, taken from the box during her interrogation on the facts, arrives at the bar on Thursday wrapped in a long black vest and cowers a little in front of the court. In the morning, heard about her personality, she recounted in a rushed and almost breathless voice the bullying and abuse she had suffered as a child – violence which she never reported during the investigation.
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In the afternoon, we come to the facts. To the “hard” facts, the Attorney General rightly says. Their outline, their outline, their legal qualification, Sandrine P. is capable of admitting them: Tuesday evening, she stopped denying to recognize the violence against her daughter, the acts of torture and barbarity having led to the death of Amandine on August 6, 2020. The “tough guy” keeps slipping away.
The atrocious images of Amandine with a skeletal body
The hard part is these two screen captures, projected on Thursday at the request of the president of the Assize Court and taken from the surveillance cameras which monitored Amandine in the storage room. On the first, dated at the end of June, the young girl is naked, prostrate, her arms folded against her chest, her forehead resting on a roll of black and white linoleum. Her hair in front of her makes a dark puddle.
When the second one, taken shortly before his death, appears, we initially struggle to understand what we see. A skeletal body standing upright, leaning on a pile of boxes like the counter of a bar and horribly arched. Amandine’s face is hidden by her messy hair.
Faced with these images, Jean-Michel C., Amandine’s father-in-law, burst into tears and repeats that he did not know, that it is “unforgivable” not to have seen. He speaks of “naivety” and “stuffiness”, he swears that he ended up believing what he was being told: Amandine had always been very thin, she was developing anorexia nervosa.
Sandrine P. says: “I saw, but I didn’t know how to react. » She swears that she never wanted her daughter to die: “Everything but not that. » For the rest, she repeats “I don’t know. »
“She asked you something?” She asked you for food? Yes or no, ma’am? asks the president.
– I don’t know.
– She asked you for a drink?
– I don’t know.
– How did his tooth break?
– I don’t know.
– Did she take a hit?
– Maybe, no doubt.
– Were you going to see her in this storage room?
– I ran the machine, I took the laundry.
– But I’m talking to you about her, madame. »
“Amandine’s life was a long punishment”
Sandrine P., during her two hours of interrogation, explains that confinement was hard for her. “Normally, Amandine was at boarding school, there were distances between her and me, we weren’t both together all the time like it was during confinement. I can only explain it like this, I go around in a loop, I wonder, and what comes back to me is this: there was no more boarding school, no more school. It was very complicated for both of us, but I never wanted to kill him. »
Sandrine P. cries on the stand. But Sandrine P. also affirms that the difficulties went “crescendo”, because Amandine refused to do her homework.
“Are you telling us she challenged you? This child who has been getting beaten for ten years, for a yes or a no? Who said I’m going to die upon hearing the announcement of confinement? She had the extraordinary courage to oppose you?
– This is reality. »
Duties, in this case, Amandine has not done any. And Sandrine P. ends up admitting that in the end, she punished her “for everything and nothing”. “That’s it, you’re welcome,” comments the president. His life was one long punishment. Ten years of punishment and violence. »
-“She told me No, not the firefighters. »
The “hard part” is still those piles of clothes that surrounded Amandine in her storage room, and which she didn’t even think of touching. This empty fridge before his eyes. Surveillance exercised by his brother and sister at the request of their mother.
The “hard” part is finally the unfolding of the day of August 6, from which we can only deduce the atrocious details. Sandrine P., on Wednesday, thanked her daughter Ambre for having “despite her young age, told the truth” on this subject but, at the bar, gave a version very similar to the one she had given during the proceedings.
Around 2 p.m. that day, she allegedly called her three children to come to the table. “Amandine, I asked her if she wanted to eat, she told me no. I went back to the kitchen level and afterwards, I don’t know how it happened… I know that Amandine was showered by Ambre, I asked her to eat, she told me Mom, I’m not hungry. I forced her to eat a spoonful of compote that she couldn’t swallow. I told him Amandine, if you don’t force yourself I will call the firefighters or take you to the hospital. She said No mom, not the firefighters. I asked Mr. C. to go get an energy drink, he came back with…” By the time she decided to go get the car to take her daughter to the hospital, Amandine would have started “foaming » before losing consciousness.
How did Amandine get to the second floor?
Sandrine P. leaves it at that. She remains on the edge of “hard”, unable to describe it. She says neither how Amandine was lifted up to the second floor, nor why it seemed necessary to ask Ambre to give her a shower when she was barely conscious – the forensic doctor explained, Wednesday, that the death had been caused in part by septicemia, triggered by scratching lesions that the child had self-inflicted due to lack of hygiene. Sandrine P. does not explain the ointment, found everywhere on her daughter’s lesions, any more than her very clean and cut nails, which surprised the pathologist. “Perhaps it was appropriate to present it to the firefighters as undamaged as possible? asks the attorney general.
– I didn’t calculate that.
– As you have not calculated that depriving her of food, locking her in this storage room would end up killing her? She was very weak, we know that in recent times she could no longer move. How did she relieve herself? There are two floors to go up to the toilets, how was it?
– I think she was going to the bathroom.
– So she went upstairs, almost dying, and then went back down into her storage room to wait for it to happen? Answer, please.
– I don’t know. »
Six days after Amandine’s death, Sandrine P. requested her daughter’s death benefit from her bank, which was refused. At the beginning of September, she went on vacation to Corsica with Jean-Michel C. “I didn’t want to leave, but he told me It’s a shame, we already have the tickets, it will do you good “. In the weeks and months that followed, she began to attack her other daughter, Ambre. Cassandra, the eldest, worried that she might be next.
“When the social workers came, I opened my door to them”
Sandrine P. says she “loves” her children, however. She assures that she “called for help”, in her own way, that she found herself alone, facing the traumas of her childhood, facing the loss of her two eldest daughters – taken by their father to Portugal to protect them – facing that of Samantha, his third daughter, victim, it seems, of sudden infant death syndrome. The violence she exercised on each of the little ones entrusted to her, she does not know how to explain.
“Why not consult? the president asks him. Why didn’t you see a social worker? Especially since there had been reports: if you were a monstrous mother, there were ways to get rid of the causes of this behavior. On the contrary ! You managed to keep things from coming to light. What pleasure did you find in maintaining this system?
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
– I had no pleasure. When the social workers came, I opened my door for them. For the children to be placed in care, it was unthinkable.
– What distinguished Amandine from the others?
– The resemblance to his father, no doubt.
– You didn’t love him?
– Yes, I loved him. »
In court on Tuesday, her eldest son Jérémy recounted how his mother took Amandine into the shower, to hit her under the icy water. How she sat one day on her little sister’s face – Sandrine P. laughed that day under her helpless gaze. “I hate her, I want justice to be done. And get her treatment. There is really a lot of work. »
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