She assures that the child died during a “pillow game” gone wrong: The trial of Sarah Caro, who was charged with the murder of her five-year-old son in 2020, opened on Wednesday at the Finistère Assizes.
“I deny,” the 29-year-old brown-haired defendant said to the President, who questioned her about the charges.
With her difficult speech, the young woman recognized only an involuntary gesture that could have led to her son’s death.
Although she has admitted to beating, slapping and cold showering her son, she doesn’t consider herself an “abusive mother”.
It is 10:38 a.m. on October 20, 2020 when she calls the emergency services and tells them that her son L. is no longer breathing. The firefighters are unable to revive the child, who is lying on a bed in his pajamas and whose temperature is unusually low (below 35°C).
The child died at 12:35 p.m. in the Brest hospital.
The mother, dazed but not crying, then explains that she played a common “pillow game” with her child, in which she sat on a pillow that was placed on her head. When he stopped moving, she would have noticed in the kitchen that he was unconscious.
During the search, police discovered four knives on the defendant’s bedside table and two handwritten words on the refrigerator. “I can no longer endure this life of nightmares and torment,” is specifically written there.
The young woman, who claims to have been contemplating suicide the day before the events, speaks of a “desperate act” and also asks to rest “in the same grave as her son”.
Depressed, RSA owner, the young woman was threatened with eviction in October 2020, with a rent debt of 7,000 euros. She raised her son alone, who had not been recognized by his father. Her two-year-old daughter, who she had with another man, was with her father at the time of the incident.
His son has been the subject of several “worrying reports” over repeated absenteeism from school, which he changed three times in two years.
His teacher had once noticed a bloody bump on his forehead: the child had suggested his mother had slammed his head against a door.
The defendant, a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who claims he is “very religious”, faces life imprisonment.