A woman alone, in the chilly air of a modest wood-heated house… Dawn is barely breaking in this corner of Franche-Comté and Sophie Rollet is once again scrutinizing the screen of her old computer. Geney (Doubs), the hamlet where she lives, is located in a white area, a little outside the digital world. To send a text message, sometimes you have to climb the hill. To surf the Internet, it is better to wait until nighttime, when connections are more reliable. So, this former childminder stays up late, very late, at the start of 2016, spending hours tracking down clues on the Internet likely to support her intuition, namely that defective Goodyear tires are the cause of multiple accidents, including the one that cost the life of her husband, Jean-Paul, in July 2014.
Upstairs, the three children are still sleeping. Soon they will have to be woken up and then taken to school. It has already been more than a year and a half since her husband died in an accident on the nearby A36 motorway. Another trucker, Pascal Rochard, victim of a tire burst, a Marathon LHS II manufactured by Goodyear, lost control of his truck, which collided with that of Jean-Paul Rollet. Both died instantly.
On the legal side, the investigation into the accident ended before it had even really begun: the left front tire did burst, but what can we conclude from this, other than that “it’s bad luck’s fault”, like the whole village thinks? Sophie Rollet has the opposite conviction, and this certainty helps her to hold on, even if something was extinguished in her with the disappearance of her husband. “It was Jean-Paul who balanced me, she said today. I existed through his gaze. Facing others, getting out of here, all that is difficult for me. » Confronting Goodyear with its errors, or rather its faults, becomes its only objective. She makes the choice to fight and not wall herself in mourning.
At World, at the time, we know nothing about her struggle when she decides to write us an email, like a bottle in the sea. A moving message, where there is a hint of dismay but also a sense of hope. She tells us about her world, a little, at least what remains of it, and her certainty of having brought to light an unprecedented scandal. Too many accidents, in too short a time, with the same tires. This cannot be a coincidence. This email, dated February 3, 2016, begins as follows: “Hello, I am taking the liberty of this correspondence to ask you a question: what do the accidents below have in common? » There follows a list of six pileups that have occurred since 2011, those mentioned in the first two parts of this series. What they all have in common is the bursting of a Goodyear Marathon tire. “A look, a suggestion would be appreciated from people like you”, she finished. She hired a lawyer, Mr.e Philippe Courtois, but he is far away, in Bordeaux, and then the justice system balks. She feels lost.
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