He “heard voices” that asked him to “do harm”: A 33-year-old man admitted to stabbing his wife and two daughters and drowning his two boys in Meaux near Paris and will be brought before a court on Thursday regarding his indictment.
• Also read: France: Arrest of a father suspected of killing his wife and four children at Christmas
During his detention, the father asserted that he “heard voices” that asked him to “do harm” without being able to “identify a trigger for his actions,” the public prosecutor of the Republic of Meaux wrote in a press release on Thursday.
“He stated that he had “not felt anything” since the events and had “felt empty,” prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier added.
For this man, who was being treated for psychotic and depressive disorders, the question of psychiatric follow-up care immediately arose.
According to Bladier, he “stated that since 2019 he had been in the habit of taking his daily medication regimen, which he was obliged to take – in a non-judicial context – but had not taken it on December 24th.”
On Christmas Day, Monday, around 9 p.m., police entered the ground floor apartment of an apartment building in Meaux's popular Beauval district, alerted by neighbors who feared they had not received any news from the family and had seen traces of blood on the landing .
AFP
They discovered a “very violent crime scene,” the prosecutor said on Tuesday. The lifeless bodies of Béatrice, the 35-year-old mother, and her four children were found in different rooms.
According to the results of the autopsy carried out on Wednesday, the mother and her young daughters, aged 10 and 7, were “victims of about ten stab wounds each”, which were “administered with very great force”. The boys, aged 4 years and 9 months, “died of asphyxia after drowning,” the prosecutor added.
The father, who has a professional qualification as a plumber but has no known profession, will be brought before an investigating judge on Thursday in view of his charges of “intentional killing of minors under 15 years of age” and “intentional killing by a spouse”.
The public prosecutor requested that he be placed in custody. Decisions are announced at the end of the day or in the evening.
The suspect was arrested on Tuesday morning in front of his father's house in Sevran, about thirty kilometers from Meaux. Video surveillance made it possible to follow his trail since he left the apartment at 8 p.m. on Monday.
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“He loved his children, he loved his wife,” the suspect's father, who had warned police about his son's presence, told RMC Radio after refusing to open the door for him. “Maybe what he did there was unconscious, he didn't know what he was doing,” he suggested.
The suspect's sister was more vicious: “No matter how many times people tell me he's crazy, I don't care, I'm angry with him,” she told RMC on condition of anonymity. “But there was no one I loved more than my brother, from the moment he was born until he was four years old. I raised him. “I am angry with him for taking Béatrice’s life, especially under these circumstances,” she said.
Béatrice, born in Haiti in 1988, was described by the defendant's sister as “the strong woman, the fighting woman, a real lioness” who supported her husband even after he stabbed her in the shoulder blade in 2019. The case was dismissed on the grounds of poor mental health, with an expert report confirming that his judgment had been lost.
The couple, who have been married for 14 years and married since October 2023, knew each other in high school.
“She was always there to defend him. He couldn't find a better woman. She was the one who took care of my brother's medications, his doctor's appointments and his administrative procedures,” she described.