“I hope to be able to go and testify at the trial. My dream would be to go there by train”, said Dominique Daufresne, his voice determined on the telephone. This 66-year-old Périgord retiree, who now lives in Libourne, is one of the 184 civil parties to the trial of the Brétigny rail disaster which opens this Monday before the Evry criminal court. On July 12, 2013, at 5.11 p.m., she was on the Intercité train heading for Limoges when it derailed. The accident killed seven people and injured more than 400. The SNCF company is on the bench of the defendants, as well as a railway executive, the one who had made the last inspection of the splint returned to the track.
Post-traumatic stress
Dominique Daufresne says it, the moment of impact remains engraved in the memory. She feels projected, forwards and backwards, “like a reverse whiplash”. Find yourself crushed against the wall of the car, the bones of the fingers broken, and open your eyes: “I was injured on the whole left side, I was a little crushed against the wall of the train, but at the time, all that, we do not realize it. We have nothing, because that we’re alive, so we necessarily have nothing. And once on the forecourt of the station, we witness the evacuations, we see the ballet of the helicopters. I repeated tirelessly, ‘but I have nothing, I’ have nothing!’ Even when the doctors came to see me, I told them, ‘take care of the others, I have nothing’. They know why we say that. It’s a shock”.
In the days and weeks that followed, I couldn’t even fit into a train hall. I had terrible anxiety attacks
The sexagenarian insists, she was immediately taken care of by the psychological unit set up by the SNCF. The rest is physical after-effects of course, but also post-traumatic stress. Until today, she has never been able to get on a train: “In the days and weeks that followed, I couldn’t even walk into a station hall. I had terrible anxiety attacks, which buried me in the ground. We are paralyzed. doing exercises for months to enter a station, go buy a newspaper in a station hall, go to the platform, so that things return to normal. And there, a few days ago, I managed to get on a train, at a standstill. When it comes, it will come”.
She wants to testify at the hearing
Dominique Daufresne also talks about her work, which she loved. She wished she could take it back once she recovered from the accident, but she was fired, and she had to retire. She talks about “ravages” for his loved ones, especially his mother, “and for them there is no accompaniment”. She has been waiting for this trial for almost ten years, but “justice sometimes takes time to be fair. What we say to ourselves is that there will finally be someone who validates the investigation of the investigating judges to say that yes, the mechanical failure is real, but that there is human beings who have not done their job. I dare to hope that when they look in the mirror after this accident, they say to themselves: ‘Damn, I did something stupid’.”
The sexagenarian is part of the association of victims EDCVB, whose president lost both parents in the disaster. She wants to testify at the hearing, when the victims are heard. She will have her car driven there. Unless she manages to get on a train to go there by herself. This would be a first since the accident: “Do we recover? Yes and no. We are forever scarred, it’s like a scar. We recover from the accident, but every time we look at this scar, or that we feel it, we think about it. It’s constitutive of the person we become”.