He “heard voices” asking him to “do harm”: a 33-year-old man admitted to having stabbed his wife and two daughters to death and drowned his two boys in Meaux, near Paris, and will be presented on Thursday to an investigating judge with a view to his indictment.
• Read also: France: arrest of a father suspected of having killed his wife and four children at Christmas
During his custody, the father assured that he had “heard voices” asking him to “do harm” without being able to “identify a trigger for his action”, wrote the prosecutor of the Republic of Meaux in a press release on Thursday.
“He specified that, since the events, he “felt nothing” and “felt empty”,” added the prosecutor, Jean-Baptiste Bladier.
The question of psychiatric follow-up immediately arose for this man under treatment for psychotic and depressive disorders.
According to Mr. Bladier, he “indicated that he was in the habit of taking his daily medication treatment to which he was required – in a non-judicial context – since 2019, but not having taken it on December 24”.
On Christmas Day, Monday around 9 p.m., alerted by neighbors worried about having no news from the family and having seen traces of blood on the landing, the police entered the apartment, on the ground floor of a residence in the popular Beauval district of Meaux.
AFP
They discovered a “very violent crime scene,” the prosecutor said on Tuesday. The lifeless bodies of Béatrice, the 35-year-old mother, and her four children were found in different rooms.
According to the results of the autopsies carried out on Wednesday, the mother and her little girls aged 10 and 7 were “victims of around ten stab wounds each”, “administered with very great violence”. The boys aged 4 years and 9 months “died of asphyxia following drowning”, added the prosecutor.
The father, who holds a professional diploma in plumbing but has no known profession, will be presented to an investigating judge on Thursday with a view to his indictment for “intentional homicide of minors under 15” and “intentional homicide by spouse”.
The prosecutor requested his placement in pre-trial detention. Decisions will be known at the end of the day or in the evening.
The suspect was arrested Tuesday morning in front of his father’s home in Sevran, about thirty kilometers from Meaux. Video surveillance had made it possible to follow his trail since he left the apartment on Monday at 8 p.m.
AFP
“He loved his children, he loved his wife,” the suspect’s father, who had warned the police of his son’s presence, told RMC radio, after refusing to open his door for him. “Maybe what he did there was unconscious, he didn’t know what he was doing,” he suggested.
The suspect’s sister was more virulent: “No matter how much people tell me he’s crazy, I don’t care, I’m angry with him,” she told RMC, on condition of anonymity. “Yet there was no one I loved more than my brother, from the time he was born until he was four years old. I raised him. I am angry with him for having taken Béatrice’s life, and especially in these conditions,” she said.
Born in Haiti in 1988, Béatrice was described by the accused’s sister as “the strong woman, the fighting woman, a real lioness”, who had supported her husband even after he had stabbed her in the shoulder blade in 2019. The procedure was dismissed on the grounds of deficient mental state, an expert opinion having attested to the abolition of his discernment.
The couple, formed for 14 years and married since October 2023, had known each other in high school.
“She was always there for him to defend him. He couldn’t find a better woman. She was the one who managed my brother’s medications, his medical appointments, his administrative procedures,” she described.