The five family members fell one after the other from the 7th floor balcony of their building in March 2022.
A willful gesture. The collective suicide of a French family in Montreux, Switzerland, whose five members threw themselves one by one from the 7th floor balcony of their building in March 2022, was being prepared and even rehearsed, revealed on Tuesday 21 should close the case.
On March 24, 2022, the crime of this family, who lived self-sufficiently in an opulent building in Montreux, just a stone’s throw from the casino of the chic town on the shores of Lake Geneva, had caused consternation. The couple’s 40-year-old father, his wife, their twin sister and their 8-year-old daughter had all died. Only the teenage son survived the fall, seriously injured and in a coma.
Even if the investigation very quickly led to a suicide, the conclusions of the canton of Vaud public prosecutor’s office show “that the mother and her sister, in contrast to an obliterated father, represented dominant and possessive personalities” and that they “kept a strong hold of the children and held them in belief in a world hostile to them”.
Survival lifestyle
As the first elements of the police investigation already suggested, the family lived in survival mode, the children had almost no outside contact, were homeschooled and only the mother’s twin sister went to work regularly. According to the investigation, the family had “prepared, rehearsed and organized” their departure into a ‘better world’ without, however, having set an exact date and was waiting for an event that would trigger it.
Neither the mother nor the little girl were registered with the authorities, but the big brother was to be homeschooled and it was a verification procedure by two police officers on the morning of March 24, 2022 that appears to have urged the family to take action.
As for the son, “he was listened to, but he is unable to narrate the course of events. He is being physically recovered and is being cared for by the Board of Trustees and Professional Guardianship Service”, specifies the Vaud Ministry, which calls for extreme restraint towards him minors.