Valentin, the 15-year-old teenager arrested on Saturday after the discovery of two bodies in his burned house in Châteauvilain in Isère, “confessed” to having killed his parents according to the prosecution, plunging his village into stupor. “I confirm that young Valentin confessed to the gendarmes to being the author of the murder of his parents,” Grenoble prosecutor Eric Vaillant said in a press release on Sunday morning.
“A horrible tragedy”
Born in 2008 and the youngest son of a family of four described as “normal, uneventful” and very well integrated into his village, Valentin was arrested on Saturday in Montpellier and placed in police custody as part of the investigation for “assassination” opened by the Grenoble public prosecutor’s office. It was the gendarmes from the research section and the Montpellier Observation and Surveillance Group (GOS) who arrested the minor. He was brought back to Isère on Saturday and his police custody was extended on Sunday for 24 hours by the investigating judge, according to the Grenoble public prosecutor’s office.
Valentin had vanished after the fire which ravaged his family’s house in Châteauvilain, a village of nearly 800 inhabitants located between Lyon and Grenoble, during the night from Sunday to Monday. In the rubble, two “almost entirely charred” bodies were found, “presumably those of the parents”, according to investigators. They had “firearm wounds to the skull” and to the thorax for one of the two. Expertise is still underway for their identification, a judicial investigation for assassinations and destruction by fire was opened on Friday.
“It’s a horrible tragedy. I’m stunned. I can’t put myself in the family’s place,” Daniel Gaude, mayor of the village for 22 years, told AFP after the announcement of Valentin’s confession. . “We will have to face it, it’s horrible for the family. Nothing suggested this,” he added.
“We can’t understand”
On this freezing Sunday morning, the streets with their roofs covered in a thin layer of snow were almost deserted, noted an AFP journalist. The old farm renovated by the family where the tragedy took place is located about a kilometer from the town hall, the school and some sports facilities (football field, city stadium, etc.), at the end of a one-way dead end. From the building now in ruins, smoke was still escaping on Sunday and the gate appears crossed out with a yellow ribbon: “National Gendarmerie – prohibited area”.
The family unit was made up of four people: in addition to the teenager, the father, a 58-year-old engineer, the 52-year-old mother who worked from home and the 17-year-old eldest son, who had left home the day before. The young man, as well as his two adult half-sisters who no longer live in the region, are safe and sound, according to the prosecution. The father had in the past been a municipal councilor in charge of the canteen-daycare, and the mother had created a small business of basketry and armchair repair. The youngest son, like his mother, had health problems linked to Lyme disease, which had caused “difficult times” for the family, according to the mayor.
“We can’t understand. We can’t imagine what happened. They were nice people as all hell. We don’t know why he did that, he was sick but not since yesterday so we don’t I don’t know. Was he also mentally ill? His parents had done a lot of things for him,” notes Claude, an 80-year-old retiree who has lived in Châteauvilain for 50 years, interviewed on Sunday by AFP.
“I saw the flames on Monday, I heard the firefighters. It’s terrible. There are no words. Everyone is talking about it in the village,” says another resident, Bruno Oliva, 60, retired from a solar panel company. “They were discreet people. The young man no longer went to school, he was isolated,” he assures AFP. Valentin’s confession? “I suspected it when we found out he left,” he comments.