Can history repeat itself? This is what one would be tempted to think about the following affair. And this is undoubtedly a question that the Assize Court of Haute-Savoie will ask itself during the trial which opens on Monday in Annecy. In the dock: a 22-year-old Haut-Savoyard. This agricultural worker was accused of murdering his partner’s father and intentional violence against the mother.
The events date back to Saturday January 23, 2021 and took place on an isolated farm in Pringy (municipality of Annecy), around thirty kilometers from the Franco-Geneva border. However, eleven years earlier, on February 22, 2010, not far away, in the village of Choisy, his father had shot his partner’s father with two gunshots (read the box). Family history which should not fail to interest the jury.
Back to January 23, 2021. At 10:53 p.m., the gendarmerie received a call for help from a young woman, claiming that her companion had just killed her father and injured her mother. On site, after the arrest of the young man, the police discovered the lifeless body of a 64-year-old farmer. The wife, aged 60, was seriously injured in the head. Facts of “very great violence” in the words of the prosecutor. In addition to the gunshots, ax blows were allegedly given.
The tragedy occurred after several weeks of tension. The young woman assured that her partner, an apprentice with her parents, could not stand their breakup, that she was afraid of him but also that he had forced her to have sex. He declared that he wanted to protect his girlfriend and her mother from the violence of the sixty-year-old. What the two women dispute.
The question of premeditation but also that of the influence of the family past should occupy the jurors. On this second point, an expert psychologist believes that “this adolescent’s passage to violent action appears strangely activated by a mechanism of traumatic repetition.” The psychiatrist also speaks of “a repetition of the traumatic family history” and the “relational deficiencies” of the accused. A heavy baggage to carry that Me Georges Rimondi, the defense lawyer (who was lawyer for the complainant in 2012) will undoubtedly highlight.
The trial lasts until Friday.
Ten years of criminal imprisonment for intentional violence resulting in death without intention of causing it. This was the verdict of the Haute-Savoie Assize Court in November 2012 against a 46-year-old man, a victualler in Cointrin. The latter had killed his father-in-law (79 years old) with a gun in 2010 in a very conflictual family context. When rendering its judgment, the Court reminded the condemned man and his ex-wife that their children, including their 10-year-old son, “could not be raised in hatred and needed love to develop harmoniously”. Twelve years later, he is in the dock.
