A 56-year-old Frenchman suffered cardiac arrest on Saturday and died on Saturday after the defibrillator that could have resuscitated him failed to start due to a lack of batteries.
“[La batterie] was stolen. Some really have no conscience! There it meant that no one in danger was helped. Lives could be saved, but we no longer offer that service there!” fumed Alain Cruchet, mayor of Luart, in an interview with Action Echo on Tuesday.
According to reports, a seasonal worker working in a cucumber field suffered a heart attack a few days earlier.
Except that Olivier Corbin, the owner of the site, also a firefighter and director of the Saint-Michel-de-Chavaignes rescue center, would have gone to the scene of the emergency, usually installed near a church, with the public defibrillator in hand, but the tool would not have started .
“I attached it with the electrodes. I was confident. I told him [Service d’aide médicale urgente] “Wait, there’s a problem, it won’t start,” he reported, according to local media, before realizing the batteries were missing.
However, the device had only been used a few months earlier, on April 2, and the electrodes were changed the next day, denounced the mayor, who reportedly filed a theft complaint, according to Action Echo.
And just two days later, the disaster scenario repeated itself when a 62-year-old woman fell ill on her lawn tractor, even though no public defibrillator was accessible.
“Have everyone regularly check their devices to make sure their batteries haven’t been stolen, to make sure they’re working properly,” the mayor would have hammered when returning the defibrillators.