Particularly shocking news. On March 24, 2022, four members of the same family died in Montreux. In their apartment in this Swiss city, five French people jumped from their balcony after climbing a stepladder. Underneath? A couple in their 40s, the mother’s twin sister, her 8-year-old daughter and her 15-year-old teenager, the only survivor of this tragedy.
More than a year later, Ariane Chemin published a detailed examination of this tragedy, “Don’t Wake Up the Children.” Although the police investigation concluded that a sectarian and survivalist drift, coupled with the Covid epidemic and the war in Ukraine, the journalist wanted to know more. According to her, this “deliberate act” was carried out by the mother and her twin sister, the granddaughters of Mouloud Feraoun, a murdered Algerian writer.
In the ELLE magazine columns, she explained that she had made “a number of discoveries.” Especially about the mother and her school reports, which had a strange sentence written on them. “Sensitive and fragile student whose behavior is unpredictable for the coming year”says Ariane Chemin. During her research, she also came across books written by her mother.
“The novels she wrote in which she described suffering from hallucinations since she was a teenager and seeing herself as a hunted woman,” she continued. The investigation concluded that it was a collective suicide, despite the presence of two minors. But Commissioner Jean-Christophe Sauterel recognizes in this book that certain things are still vague.
Family thrown out of window in Montreux: “We won’t be able to know everything”
“We don’t know everything. We won’t know everything. We won’t be able to know everything. There is a part of this story and this day for which we will not have an answer. You just have to admit that in such situations there are secrets that you will never know. People don’t like not knowing, but there you go. There are things that belong to this family,” he confided to Ariane Chemin.
According to the prosecutor in charge of this investigation, it was the sisters who planned everything. “They portrayed dominant and possessive personalities, as opposed to a reserved father,” the press release said. They kept them believing in a world that was hostile to them. » According to the conspiratorial and survivalist family, this suicide was “a departure for a better world.”.