on the first day of the trial, the young man’s family testifies

Commissioner Grégoire Chassaing has been on trial since Monday in Rennes for the death of Steve Maia Caniço, who fell in the Loire during a police operation in 2019, on the evening of the Fête de la Musique. On the first day of the trial, his mother and uncle were heard.

The trial of police commissioner Grégoire Chassaing began Monday, June 10, at the Rennes judicial court. The commissioner is accused of involuntary manslaughter after the death of young Steve Maia Caniço on June 21, 2019, during the Music Festival in Nantes. The young man fell into the Loire and drowned while a police intervention was taking place on the quay that the prosecution considers inappropriate and disproportionate.

This first day of hearing was marked, among other things, by the moving hearings of Steve’s loved ones. His mother, in tears, describes her boy: hypersensitive, hating violence, phobic of water to the point of never being able to learn to swim. “Imagining his last moments is awful. The panic, the tear gas, then the Loire and its currents… That’s all that scared him”, she sighs. Steve’s uncle, too, is moved on the stand and repeats: “And to think that all of this was avoidable…”

Understand avoidable, if the police had not carried out such an intervention. Steve Maia Caniço fell into the Loire at 4:33 a.m., just after the start of the operation led by Commissioner Grégoire Chassaing. Operation which aimed to stop the music of a recalcitrant DJ and arrest a few revelers who threw projectiles at them. According to the prosecution, the police response was disproportionate and unsuitable for the scene: 33 tear gas bombs were thrown, without warning, in 20 minutes.

It is then the head of civil protection, present that evening on the platform, who arrives at the helm. He remembers the thick cloud, the sudden confusion, his cough, the people calling out to him – because at least seven people had fallen into the Loire -. He expresses his frustration: “We don’t have the equipment to intervene on the river. I called the rescue company, but by the time they arrived…” The rescuer says he saw a silhouette in the water, a face drifting, then nothing. Without a doubt Steve…

One of the prosecutors asks him: “You have been a volunteer for 14 years and have overseen such festive evenings. Have you ever experienced such a degraded context? ?” “No, never, no.”he replies.