Sandrine Prioul / Photo credits: DAMIEN MEYER / AFP
A 12-year-old student threatened an English teacher at a college in Rennes with a knife on Wednesday morning without hurting her. This student had been excluded in June from another college in Rennes for threats and insults against a teacher and had already brought a knife into the establishment without using it, according to the Rennes public prosecutor Philippe Astruc. Europe 1 met her class friend to whom she had announced a few days ago that she wanted to kill her teacher who had confiscated her phone.
“I didn’t know she was like that.”
“I said, if she does that, we’re no longer friends,” says a schoolgirl interviewed by Europe 1. “I felt bad, my heart raced, I couldn’t do anything. Afterwards the police arrived and she said hello to me before leaving. I didn’t know she was like that but I just know that since she was little, she has had mental, psychological problems. She m “said she would rather go to prison than not kill the teacher,” her friend testified.
His classmates were all worried about his mental state. “One thing scared us: when we said to her ‘stop, calm down, you’re doing anything’, she let out a smile and she laughed strangely, like a psychopath and that’s when everyone started to be afraid”, says this schoolboy on the microphone of Europe 1.
“We are no longer protected in our profession”
The teacher’s composure in the face of a suffering schoolgirl who confides to her: “I’m crazy today, I want to kill someone today, I want to kill the students who don’t “I don’t like and the person in front of me. It happened in Arras and I’m going to do the same”, in reference to the assassination of French teacher Dominique Bernard. An attack “too many” for the FO departmental delegate, Justine Marty. “I am dismayed. I immediately thought of Samuel Paty, of Dominique Bernard. We are finally becoming a profession where we can be attacked at work. It becomes a form of normality and I find it frightening. I “I feel like we are no longer protected in our profession,” she says.
“There is, once again, a crisis but to a greater degree and the question is: National Education is informed of this student’s past, what has been done in the meantime? Was there psychological follow-up for this young girl? Sufficient supervision from National Education? We have been asking for resources for a long time,” she continued.
After a psychiatric examination, the schoolgirl was hospitalized. Psychiatric assessments will decide on legal action for this 12-year-old child. The investigation rules out at this stage any radicalization of the teenager. “There is no evidence to this effect,” says the prosecutor.