After the death by poisoning of Lisa, an 11-month-old girl in Lyon in a People & Baby group crèche on June 22, an employee, Myriam J., was indicted for intentional homicide and temporarily detained in prison. by Lyon Corbas. Franceinfo had access to the first elements of the investigation.
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Everything happened in a very short time, around 8 am, when the crèche opened. Myriam J., the 27-year-old employee, welcomes the little girl alone, dropped off by her father. The child, who is crying, crawls towards Myriam J. cleaning in an adjoining room and grabs her leg. The employee then makes him ingest Top, an unblocker, before returning to work. When two mothers arrive a few minutes later, Myriam J., panicked, leads them to the convulsing baby. Taken to the Woman Mother Child Hospital (HFME) in Bron, she died around noon that same day.
Myriam J. continues to work until 2 p.m., before leaving the crèche. The police who go to his home are received by his mother. When she calls her daughter, Myriam J. wanders in the Tête d’Or park. On her laptop, she types the key words “ingestion of unblocker product + toilet + swallows + by + a + child”. She was then arrested by the police and taken into custody.
Myriam J. confesses in three stages. She speaks first of an accident: the child would have swallowed gouache, and would have poisoned himself with it. Then she says that she tried to clean the paint off the child’s face with the Top for fear of being reprimanded.
Finally, during his second audition, “more talkative” according to the police, Myriam J. admits having “freak out” in his own words. She admits having voluntarily made Lisa ingest “toilet unblocker”, without thinking of the consequences and above all, without intending to kill her. That’s what she still maintains today. The childcare worker wanted to finish her cleaning job, she explains. Finally, during her hearings, Myriam J. highlights her fatigue the day before the tragedy, her argument on the phone with her boyfriend in pre-trial detention since November. She finally shares a miscarriage that occurred three weeks before the facts.
According to the Lyon prosecutor’s office, she has no criminal record. The director and the employees explained that they had nothing to report on his behavior, just a lack of experience in organizing activities with the little ones. She had recently completed child protection training, according to People & Baby. But according to testimonies collected by franceinfo from several childcare workers working in other nurseries in the group, this training does not last more than half an hour, including 5 minutes of presentation, with the broadcast of a video and the provision of some links to consult.
However, parents revealed to investigators that in April they found lesions in their son’s mouth and scarlet marks on his upper body, with supporting photos, after he was entrusted to Myriam J. during the siesta. That day, a childcare assistant had been alerted by the cries of the baby, found in the arms of Myriam J.. The family doctor was unable to say where these lesions came from, if they were a skin disease, such as hives. Still, the little boy later began to desquamate, in other words he lost a lot of dead skin in his mouth. For his part, the employee’s lawyer, Maître Philippe Duplan, describes a young woman “immature” and wants to prove that his client did not intend to kill the girl.
A few minutes after the tragedy, Myriam J. confided to one of her colleagues who had just arrived: “What happened is serious, I will be fired, I will be punished”. There are still questions to be answered by the investigation: what was a bottle of destop doing in the crèche, when the director of the establishment explained to the investigators that there were only salt-based cleaning products? A can of bleach and a branded product Top were however seized by the police in the structure. Justice will also have to determine if Myriam J. killed the girl voluntarily or involuntarily. The young woman faces 30 years of criminal imprisonment for intentional homicide of a 15-year-old minor.