Emma, ​​13: an appointment with death

Surprised not to see her daughter Emma, ​​13 years and 8 months old, at breakfast, Nathalie calls her from the bottom of the stairs. Faced with silence, she goes upstairs. With its dressing room and office area, Emma’s bedroom is the size of a small apartment. On the walls, lots of photos of girlfriends and even more of Rubis, the pony. “My confidant, the love of my whole life”, as Emma says. She captioned them: “Return from a ride with Rubis”, “Dressage with Rubis”…

“Emma dear, are you there? ” It is 7 o ‘clock. This June 9, the big bed has not been unmade and Nathalie is really starting to worry. She immediately contacts some of the friends who sometimes spend the night here, on a mattress on the floor. Then she goes out into the village. After a few steps towards the stadium, she sees a crowd.

Nathalie remembers stationary vehicles with their warning lights, flashing lights and the bus from Lugny – where her daughter’s college is located – oddly parked across the road. She sees people in tears, devastated, unable to articulate a word. She recognizes the road-mender, then a volunteer fireman and, finally, the baker who comes by every day on his rounds. Why such fear in their eyes? A young policeman, just as dejected, approaches slowly. Unable to announce the drama to him, he tries to save time, launches into a lie: “Do not worry, it does not concern you. When, without further ado, an officer asks Nathalie for a photo of her daughter, she understands and calls Pascal, her husband, who left to work very early in his public works company. ” Come quickly ! »

It was “Clchette”, as the 850 inhabitants of Clessé (Saône-et-Loire) call their roadmender, who was the first to see this unbearable scene. In the alley that runs alongside the stadium, a body stretched out on its back, fists clenched. A disfigured face. He still recognizes Emma, ​​whom he meets morning and evening at the bus stop. Planted in his neck, a knife. On the macadam, a puddle of blood. But we see traces on 30 meters, as well as papers taken out of a satchel, scattered in the middle of some jewels.

For 2 months, between Emma and Joris, clashes alternated with reconciliations

Obviously, Emma tried to escape her or her attackers, the investigators immediately think. Upset, Jean-Pierre Chervier, the mayor, opens two classrooms of the school to them for the auditions. It was thinking big, because the very first testimonies immediately put them on the trail of a suspect: Joris, 14, resident of Viré, a neighboring village. Emma met him at the start of the school year; both attended the same class of fourth of the college Victor-Hugo de Lugny, where Joris repeated. Their relationship was tumultuous, they had broken up in December, Joris would then have had another affair; then, with the spring, their chaste flirtation had resumed. But, for two months, clashes alternated with reconciliations, and Emma’s closest friends sensed her distress. To hear them, Joris used words “very harsh, very hurtful” towards him, to the point that one of them, Méliné, 14, daughter of the baker from Lugny, had suggested that he leave him. “But I love him,” Emma replied. Méliné told his mother that he nevertheless constantly gave her orders, “do this, do that” and “go to the wall at such a time and we’ll meet again”. Another friend even claims that Joris “harassed” her.

Around 9 a.m., Thursday, June 8, the gendarmes arrested the schoolboy. On his hands, scratches, lesions. That morning, very naturally, Joris got on the bus, in Viré, and no one noticed anything in particular in his behavior. Does he then think of giving the change? In police custody, he first admits having stabbed three times. “Then he became more cooperative,” underlines his lawyer, Me Amélie Gemma, from the Mâcon bar. She points to this “disturbing calm” which presages a “painful decompensation”. Joris does not seem “to be aware of his act. In any case, he does not explain it”.

The prosecutor affirms it: “Joris came to kill. »

The day before, around midnight, he met Emma in front of the stadium, fifty short yards from her home and her parents. This is where, most of the time, they meet, sometimes until very late. That night, Joris arrived with a knife hidden in one of his sleeves. “He previously trained in its handling,” said the Mâcon prosecutor, Éric Jallet. Only three shots? “A dozen,” he finally clarified. Emma’s upper torso and shoulders are lacerated. His nose, snapped. She would have liked to run away, but he would have caught up with her, would have tried to strangle her. The prosecutor affirms it: “He came to kill. But it will have to be established that the gesture was premeditated. Joris is indicted for intentional homicide with premeditation, and was brought to the Dijon remand center, minors’ quarter. His first psychiatric examination, less thorough than the real expertise that the lawyer intends to order, concludes with a significant alteration of discernment, without abolition, making it accessible, at this stage, to a criminal sanction.

Nothing is yet known of the real reason for this tragic meeting. Investigators will have to unravel the why among sometimes divergent versions. Who wanted to break up? “Joris”, say some of his friends. “It was he who dumped her, he who wanted to get back together with her to separate again. But then, why come with the intention of killing her? For his lawyer, the drama would have nothing to do with these stories of rupture. Control, dependence, jealousy? Or a feeling of omnipotence which reduces the other to the state of an object? A story of adults lived by children.

“My wife and I try to understand,” says Pascal, Emma’s father. Like his wife, he collapsed. They have lost their raison d’etre but they have no hatred. They thought that their daughter was “perhaps under the yoke of this young man, as happens during a first love”, but that “she was also perhaps trying to put him on the right path… Emma was so benevolent”. Because Joris is described by his friends as a teenager who has become, over the years, “cold, brutal, bizarre”, even “disturbing”. He lacerated his wrists. Joris evolved in a tumultuous family environment, against a background of violence. Her parents recently separated. Joris had to see a psychiatrist with whom he had had a first appointment. In front of his friends, he had proclaimed loud and clear his desire to “kill someone”. Words confirmed by the prosecutor. The friends had taken it for boasting, black humor.

Nathalie had perceived a slight change in her daughter’s attitude and was waiting for Emma to confide, which happened regularly. But it had to mature. “Mom, I have something to tell you. “I know,” answered Nathalie with a smile. It was always like that between them.

This Wednesday, June 8 had however started well. Emma had spent the afternoon at the Laizé pony club, a few kilometers from Clessé. She had frequented this enchanting place since she was 4 years old and met there Rubis, 17, whom she loved like her own pony. Rather fearful, nervous, the animal always has a tendency to run to the back of the box when a rider tries to put the halter on it. But with Emma, ​​he willingly approached. “They had a really special relationship, with its language, its codes”, explains Maeva, 23, instructor in training. When, in mid-May, Rubis was injured – a slight sprain – Emma came to take care of him, walking him to the river, then letting him graze before bringing him back to the club. On June 8, she returned radiant, telling her parents: “Rubis is cured! Tomorrow I can ride it. »

June 9, which was supposed to be a party, will see his short life come to an end. Three days later, on Saturday 11, Me Patrick Uzan, of the bar of Dijon, council of the parents of Emma, ​​passed all the morning in the house of Clessé. Facing him, Pascal, Nathalie and her parents. Me Uzan describes to us “the deafening silence and the immense sadness of these four looks which almost implored me to give them back their daughter and which seemed to desire, at that moment, to join her. They took me upstairs to the bedroom, a place full of happiness, freedom. I was overwhelmed as I watched Emma’s black and white cat, Cuddle, lay on her pillow, waiting. Joris, they had caught a glimpse of him once, as he was crossing the yard. They keep the image of a very tall, very thin boy. Pascal took me to the crime scene. After recollecting himself, he murmured: “Can you imagine? Fifty meters from my house… I heard nothing, I couldn’t do anything.” »