“He fought hard and left her for dead”

The attempted femicide took place early in the morning of this Monday, February 21. An attack that Johanna, mother of 3 children, did not expect. Recently separated from her ex-companion, who had just found new accommodation in Nancy a month and a half ago, Johanna had managed to extricate herself from a situation of domestic violence that had lasted for years. She and her children had regained security and serenity since the man had left home. So as not to deprive his children of their father, the young woman had however agreed to welcome him to the family home during the school holidays : “He asked to see the little ones for a week, and seeing that they hadn’t seen their father for a month and a half, my sister agreed, telling him: “You leave Monday morning. From the moment the children go back to school, you no longer have your place here and you leave.”” explains Adeline, his sister, who agreed to testify with Aufeminin.

At the end of this week’s vacation, this Monday, February 21, her ex-husband was supposed to leave Johanna’s accommodation. It is the approach of this deadline that would have led him to commit the irreparableearly morning.

Adeline says:He was supposed to go to sleep with the kids, and my sister in the living room. But he didn’t fall asleep at all because he was drunk and on cocaine, and he reportedly had a blood stroke at 6:45 a.m. Visibly, he would have first strangled, suffocated, until she lost consciousness, and it was while trying to suffocate her that he would have fractured her jaw in 2 places by pressing on her face with his knee , before stabbing her. The knife pierced her cheek and touched her gums, she also lost a tooth. This is the most plausible course given his injuries.“

“He left Johanna for dead”

An attack of unprecedented violence, which is relentless for Adeline : “He left my sister for dead, because he thought she was dead. Otherwise, he would have finished the job, since he did it twice”. The young woman was then transported to the hospital thanks to the reflex of her 5-year-old son, Rayanwho managed to contact the emergency services, the 3 children having witnessed the attack on their father.

Supported in time, Johanna came close to death: “She was operated on twice in total, Monday and Tuesday, the operation to repair the jaw having lasted more than 6 hours. She narrowly escaped thanks to my nephew’s call, the doctors told him that she was hit 2 millimeters from the jugular. Sewing it up there was very tricky.”

Asleep at the time of his attackJohanna has not yet been interviewed by the police but is expected to receive the conclusions of the medical examiner : “He hasn’t been able to come see her yet but he should do so soon, so we should know more in a few days. My sister doesn’t really realize that she suffered an attempted murder. I only learned yesterday morning from my sister that she also suffered an attempted sexual assault on the night of the tragedy.”

A failure of the police system

In this drama, as in too many cases of feminicide, the failure of the police forces appears as staggering. Johanna had already filed numerous complaints in recent years, and in this case, she had filed one the day before the femicide attempt, following an attempted rape on the night of Saturday February 19 to Sunday February 20: “The complaint was filed 24 hours before the tragedy, on Sunday morning at 9 a.m. There were 2 attempted sexual assaults. The 2nd time, he allegedly ripped off her panties, an item that was given to the criminal. I knew about it directly because my sister called me at 5am that day because the police weren’t coming. They took more than an hour to arrive while my sister lives less than 1km from the police station”.

Complaints for domestic violence, Johanna has actually filed more than onein 8 years of living together with her ex-companion: at least tenhalf of which she had to withdraw out of fear or constraint, her sister confides to us, not to mention the handrails. So many unequivocal signals that should have aroused the vigilance of the police : “I myself was led, from Paris, to call the Nice police several times to come to his home, because by dint of filing and withdrawing complaints, they no longer even bothered to move to her house. My sister knew that in order for the police to come, it had to be me who called”. Faced with the support of his sister and the accompaniment of a policewoman, Johanna had had the courage this time not to withdraw her complaint :

I told him : “especially, this one, you leave it, out of the question to remove it”. She told me that the policewoman who had questioned her had been very nice to her, and that she had felt listened to unlike other times.. This policewoman told him “Don’t worry, when he comes out of custody, there is a police patrol that will come with him to collect his things from your house”. Only, 6 hours after that, he came out of police custody alone, free, and he came back to my sister. And he begged him to stay until the next day.

A failure of the complaint handling but also of support for both the victim and the alleged aggressor, who contributed to the tragedy that occurred on February 21. A tragedy that could have been avoided all the more the Nice police had already been informed of a previous attempt at femicide : “6 or 7 months ago, she had already been the victim of an attempted murder in Italy, again in front of her children. I had had her in video at that time, around 3 a.m., and she was completely disfigured, bleeding, and distraught”. At the police station, her ex-spouse, who spoke Italian unlike her, would then have introduced Johanna as “a schizophrenic on medication who should not be listened to”. Unable to give his version of the facts in the absence of a translator, the young woman would have been taken back to the border in the early morning without being rescued, neither by the local police nor by the Nice police : “That night, between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., I called the Nice police station, who told me that it was outside the border and that it was not their responsibility.” laments Adeline.

After leaving his ex-girlfriend for dead and kidnapping his eldest son, the man tried to flee to Italy but was caught at the station before he could board the train. Here again, Johanna’s sister points out her incomprehension of the ignorance in which the relatives of the victim were left : “He was found at the station, but it is not known under what circumstances. I don’t know any more because the investigation is ongoing and I don’t have any information. Through an association, a policewoman contacted me to inform me more, behind the back of her hierarchy, because she did not understand that we remained without news. The day before yesterday, she therefore reassured me, so that I could reassure my sister in my turn, on the fact that he was going to pre-trial detention and would not be released before the trial.”. For the upcoming trial, Adeline should file a civil actionbeing the person most aware of the domestic violence suffered by Johanna since 2015.

A fight that has only just begun

Adeline is aware of both the luck, for his sister, to have survivedas much as the horror of the drama from which she narrowly escapes: “This is what many women, sisters, mothers say to themselves. Believing that we won’t get there precisely, believing that everything is possible but not this option” she comments on her last post. Johanna’s sister, herself a single mother, finds herself in manage multiple problems head-on, alone : support her sister in this ordeal, protect her children, defend Johanna’s cause in private and in public, whether within her family, on the networks or in the courts.

Herself a former victim of domestic violence, Adeline decided to fight on behalf of her sister by launching the Instagram account @justicepourjohanna and the hashtag of the same name, an initiative made in agreement with the principal concerned. Revolted by the dysfunction of the police system, Adeline wants to publicize the drama that her sister is going through to make public opinion and the government react : “We want to share his story as much as possible so that justice can review its laws. If a woman lodges a complaint and then withdraws it, French justice does not see the problem, and that is not normal. We know very well that a woman who withdraws a complaint after filing it, especially with marks of blows and injuries, is done under duress or fear.”. By echoing this situation, Johanna’s sister also calls for redress from the company:

“The aggravated attempted murder was retained, with no assistance to anyone in danger on 4 people. May justice be done for my sister, may the heaviest sentence be pronounced for her ex-husband because there is not only my sister in this story, but also 3 children who have just been destroyedand who have already been experiencing psychological violence for years.”

Yet another fight which is committed for his children who, exposed to domestic violence, are to be considered as co-victims. Today placed separately by social services, they will have a long way to go before they can rebuild themselves: “A few months ago, when his father came home drunk and he knew his mother was going to be hit, Younès, the eldest, had the reflex to hide all the knives. And at 6, he started wetting the bed again because he was scared. My niece is something else again: my sister was hit throughout this pregnancy, and it had repercussions on their relationship. She is a little girl who seeks love from everyone. And then Rayan, the smallest, developed stutters.”

Adeline would like today to be able to take in her sister’s children at her homeshe took the legal steps to prove that she would be able to provide for them and should receive a response from the family court judge on March 7. In the meantime, Johanna’s sister has launched a participatory kitty to cover all the material expenses she will have to face in the coming months to help her sister.

Yes the family of the two sisters has dissociated itself from their dramatic situationsometimes reproaching Johanna for not having been able to protect her own children, sometimes Adeline for publicizing the affair, the latter wishes alert to the guilt of victims and the trivialization of domestic violencestill very significant in these cases: “We have to stop minimizing the facts, to say that it’s her fault because she didn’t leave. She couldn’t. She was trying to protect her children somehow”. And Johanna could have been one more woman to join the ranks of those who succumbed to the blows of their spouse or ex-spouse: to date, there have been 19 feminicides since the beginning of 2022.