In 2007, she stabbed her five children – aged between 3 and 15 – and was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.
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Had killed in 2007 had killed stab wounds his five Children – who were between 3 and 15 years old – and were subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. Today, Geneviève Lhermitte, 56, is back on the front page of local newspapers after her act shocked the small Belgian town of Nivelles. “Due to irreversible mental illness,” the woman died in the Leonardo da Vinci Hospital in Montigny-le-Tilleul in the past few days, after having requested and received euthanasia.
Euthanasia, rape victim Nathalie gets the green light in Belgium: “Excruciating pain, I’ve been dead since 2016”
The request
The practice has been legal in the country since 2002. At the time of the tragedy, the woman, who had given up her job as a teacher years earlier to devote herself fully to her family, was suffering from severe depression and was being treated by a psychiatrist for six years. At the end of the massacre, he unsuccessfully attempted suicide, just before leaving a letter addressed to a friend, explaining that he was in a “hopeless” situation.
In December 2008, the Nivelles court sentenced her to life imprisonment and found her capable of understanding and guilty of first degree murder, even after the discovery of a letter the woman had written to her psychologist the day before the murders, in which she this revealed his plans to commit suicide and take his children with him. A second analysis concluded that the woman could not be held responsible for her actions and recommended that she be committed to a psychiatric hospital. Following her life sentence, she had benefited from probation to undergo psychiatric treatment.
the previous one
The euthanasia granted to Lhermitte is the second case highlighted by the national press in a few days: another Belgian, Nathalie Huygens, mother of two, received authorization to end her life because of psychological problems following a rape that took place in Vilvoorde in 2016 instead, which no therapy could alleviate. The application was approved in January by a commission composed of two psychiatrists and a doctor, who had extensively visited and monitored the patient before approval. The son also supported the election in an open letter: “For years we have been in a situation in which the mother is still alive physically, but no longer mentally,” he wrote. Now only the date on which the procedure will take place is missing
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