(Bayonne) The student who stabbed his Spanish teacher to death in southwestern France was charged with murder on Friday and remanded in custody, his lawyer said.
The 16-year-old teenager had stabbed the 52-year-old teacher with a kitchen knife on Wednesday, in the middle of class, in an establishment in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, upsetting the French educational community.
The schoolboy will be imprisoned in “an establishment which will take into account both his youth, and the care he needs”, explained the lawyer, Mr.e Thierry Sagardoytho.
“We are talking about a young person unknown to the judicial and educational radars, who suddenly took action, at the cost of personal motivations that I refrain from putting in the public square but which need to be probed. […] by psychiatrists”, in order to determine whether his discernment was “full”, or “on the contrary abolished, or possibly altered”, he added.
“We will have to go well beyond the summary examination”, added the lawyer who said he was “dismayed to read the report” made to the press of the first psychiatric examination of which the teenager in custody.
On Thursday, the public prosecutor of Bayonne, Jérôme Bourrier, had declared that this first examination had revealed “a form of reactive anxiety which could disturb his discernment” and “elements of depression evolving for a year”, but “no mental illness schizophrenia, manic state, melancholy or mental retardation, or acute psychiatric decompensation”.
“The adolescent appears accessible to criminal liability subject to the expertise which will have to be ordered and a possible alteration of his discernment”, added the prosecutor.
PHOTO GAIZKA IROZ, FRANCE-PRESSE AGENCY
Wreaths of flowers were laid in front of the Saint-Thomas d’Aquin establishment
For the lawyer, this expertise “completely ignores the suicide attempt” of the teenager in October 2022, mentioned by the prosecutor, “and the medical prescriptions of which he was the object”.
“It is not an expertise worthy of the name”, added Me Sagardoytho, emphasizing that “many of those who know him guess that there is a problem”, “a kind of drowning, of intimate suffering which could have led to irreparable damage”.
During his police custody, the teenager “has put forward a small voice which speaks to him, a being whom he describes as selfish, manipulative, egocentric, who incites him to do evil and who would have suggested to him the day before to commit an assassination”, explained Jérôme Bourrier.
The schoolboy also admitted “a form of animosity towards his Spanish teacher”, the only subject where his results were not good.