A man comes into work one fine morning. Starts his day as a bus driver like every morning for 10 years. Gets passengers on and off.
Then, after this mundanely normal start to the working day, he leaves the road with the same bus and rushes to a daycare center. Kill two children. Not by accident, the police tell us: for the purpose of killing. Randomly. Blindly.
Why does a man who has never had any dealings with the law turn into a child killer?
Three days later, we don’t know. But even if we “knew”, what exactly would we understand?
No doubt a mental health problem, it was immediately advanced. It’s a catch-all explanation, which gives us the impression of having found some reason.
To destroy what is most beautiful, you have to be crazy, right?
First, we don’t know. Second, even with a diagnosis, we would still be left with this agonizing question: why? Why him, that day?
Forensic psychiatry may well establish a diagnosis, identify a disorder that excludes the criminal responsibility of an accused – or not. We are left with the question: why him? Why did this individual commit such a horrific crime, and not the thousands of others with the same disease?
We don’t live well with absurdity. It takes a reason. We must bring order to the chaos and sadness that such a crime causes.
Yet there is no imaginable “reason” for such an act. And if there’s no reason, it’s because “it” can happen, destroy lives. Beginning lives, which are the most precious thing a society has. Destroy hope itself, at all times, in the most unassailable place possible.
We look for the warning signs. Maybe next time, if we detect them, we can prevent that?
The accused driver was not on the social services waiting list, Minister Lionel Carmant said, as if to rule out some sort of institutional neglect by the state.
If it had been, we could have blamed the “system”, the “machine”. Nothing would have been explained. So many people are waiting for care. They don’t kill.
When religion admits its incompetence to explain the unspeakable, it speaks of “mystery”.
We turn to psychology. But it too quickly reaches its limits. Neither genetics, nor neurology, nor dives into the depths of the brain will tell us why.
Should daycare centers be better protected? journalists asked the Minister of Public Security. If we can’t predict, at least prevent? We cannot prepare for the unpredictable, replied François Bonnardel. The man did not use a firearm, nor anything that should have been registered, or off the shelf, but the least disturbing vehicle, his work tool.
One day, we will have some form of explanation. A mobile. A medical diagnosis, perhaps. We will know how it happened.
But why, really, a man, this man, that day, goes out of his marked road in the middle of his shift to kill children, instead of going straight?
No trial will tell us.