He will have left the Marchant psychiatric hospital for more than 24 hours. The patient from the Toulouse center was arrested on Saturday evening in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He had left his place of internment on Friday afternoon, nearly 700 kilometers away.
At 43, the man had been indicted for a rape committed in 2011 on his ex-girlfriend before a dismissal was pronounced in 2013. He would have tried to find the latter during the past 24 hours. “This patient will be medically taken care of and is subject to an isolation measure”, confirm Etienne Guyot, the prefect of Occitanie, and Pierre Ricordeau, the director general of the Regional Health Agency Occitanie in a joint press release.
The third patient to flee Marchant in ten days
This man is the third to have thwarted the surveillance of his caregivers, in less than ten days. And while additional security measures were put in place in the Toulouse establishment. In recent days, the care units had to be closed, even for patients on the loose, who represent two thirds of the residents.
This patient therefore managed to escape, despite increased guards and on-call duty, in accordance with the measures required by the Regional Health Agency of Occitanie. Requests after two other previous escapes in eight days: first, that of the cannibal of the Hautes Pyrénées, who had killed a man in 2013. Declared criminally irresponsible after the murder of a nonagenarian, Jérémy Raimbaud was recently interned in Toulouse. On January 20, this ex-military Pau had ventured several hours in the streets of Toulouse before being caught by the police. During this time, he had violently attacked a septuagenarian 7 kilometers from the hospital, before being interned there again. His victim has since filed a complaint.
On Sunday, it was another Marchant patient who was found by the police several hours after his disappearance. This series does not only focus on the center located closest to the AZF memorial, since two days ago, a 32-year-old man interned in psychiatry at Purpan hospital had also fled, triggering the fire system, before being stopped.
In response to this barely believable chain of disappearances, the ARS also launched an inspection mission and an administrative investigation to shed light on the facts.
In Marchant, “a job done as it should”
In the now closed walls of the Marchant hospital center, the atmosphere is “very heavy” according to Dr. Radoine Haoui. The head of the adult psychiatry center reacts on France Bleu Occitanie to this succession of disappearances of his patients.
All the caregivers did their job properly – Dr. Radoine Haoui, head of the adult psychiatry center in Marchant
“I think the ARS inspection will be able to determine if there have been any breaches. That said, the three situations are completely different”, explains the doctor. Reviews of experiences will be carried out to understand by what sequence, these three patients were able to give way to caregivers.
The result will make it possible to identify faults, because they remain entirely possible, according to the head of psychiatry in adults: “I’m not saying that there can’t be flaws. But in any case, we are already at work trying to carefully examine each of these situations with a fine-toothed comb”.
Addressing a very special thought to the victim of Jérémy Raimbaud, Françoise, seriously injured in the arms, doctor Radoine Haoui awaits the results of the inspection carried out by the ARS. While concluding: “honestly, I think we did our job properly”.