This Sunday, September 25, RMC Story is broadcasting an unpublished number of Bring in the accused. On the program: the murder of Aurélien Pioger, a 28-year-old grape picker victim of a very violent “collective punishment”.
A victim of a terrible relentlessness. On October 19, 2008, the body of Aurélien Pioger, 28, is discovered hanging in an agricultural lean-to in the town of Saint-Lambert-du-Lattay, in Maine-et-Loire. His van is parked in a field. The place, particularly isolated, is located 10 km from the camp where he had settled with other seasonal workers.
While the thesis of suicide is put forward at first, certain elements challenge the investigators. These discover purplish marks on the victim’s faceand realize that both feet touch the ground. So many anomalies that intrigue the gendarmes and end up directing them towards the hypothesis of a disguised murder. According to several of his colleagues, Aurélien was first the victim of serious violence. “A collective rage was poured out on this boy”had summed up a lawyer during the trial.
Seven people in the dock
Seven of Aurélien’s seasonal comrades, aged 25 to 48, were indeed tried before the Angers Assize Court in March 2013. The main defendants had to answer for acts of “sequestration with acts of torture and barbarism” and of “murder”. Other people who witnessed the violence were tried for failure to prevent a crime.
The investigation carried out made it possible to trace the way in which Aurélien Pioger found himself to be the target of a kind of collective punishment that occurred after a drunken evening. That evening, the young man would have had a sexual relation with one of the girls of the group whose companion was absent. “This was perceived by all as rape, and this community decided on a correction”, had indicated the lawyer of the oldest of the defendants. Aurélien would thus have been victim of punches, kicks, as well as jets of urine. The young man would have suffered his ordeal tied under a tarpaulin, the night of Friday and all day Saturday.
“They had a choice: let him live or finish the job”
A witness of constant passage that Aurélien couldn’t move or open his eyes, would then have asked that he be transported to the hospital. But two of his offices, followed by two others by car, would then have decided to take the young man and his van away from the camp. According to the prosecution, Aurélien would then have been put to death and hanged, while the defense assured that he would have ended his life. “After the torture, they had a choice: let him live or finish the job.”explained the lawyer of the grandparents of Aurélien.
At the end of the trial, one of the defendants was finally sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment, and two others to 15 years. Thirty years of imprisonment had however been required against the three men. None of them was found guilty of the murder, for lack of insufficient elements to impute the crime to one of them. The winegrower’s daughter, suspected of complicity in murder, was sentenced to 3 years in prison, 1 of which was suspended. The young woman who warned the group that Aurélien was having sex with another young girl in the group, and thus triggered the violence perpetrated against him, was also sentenced to 3 years in prison, one of which was suspended. finally, two other men accused of non-disclosure were sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence.