This is the fourth runaway of a dangerous individual in ten days in Toulouse. A new patient fled from the Gérard-Marchant psychiatric hospital on Friday January 28, said the regional health agency (ARS) of Occitanie. This patient still at large, aged 43, is known for acts of rape, we learned from a source close to the investigation. He is the third, in less than two weeks, to escape from this psychiatric hospital located south of Toulouse, while a psychiatric patient at the Purpan hospital also had to be sought for a few hours on Thursday.
“Additional security measures had been requested by the director general of ARS Occitanie in the psychiatric services in Toulouse, to prevent any new patient running away”, explains the ARS in a press release. These measures, which directly targeted the Gérard-Marchant hospital and the Purpan university hospital in Toulouse, involved, among other things “Securing entrances and exits” and “strengthening patient monitoring”, specifies the institution.
Criminally irresponsible
Last week, two patients from the same psychiatric hospital in Toulouse had disappeared, before being found a few hours later, and interned again. These two men, suspected of murder, had been considered criminally irresponsible and could not be tried.
The first, a 34-year-old former soldier nicknamed the “cannibal of the Pyrenees”, escaped from Gérard-Marchant hospital on January 19, before attacking a 72-year-old woman who was walking her dog in a residential area of Toulouse. He was investigated in 2013 for intentional homicide and acts of cannibalism.
The second, aged 48, involved in a homicide in 2010, fled on Sunday before being arrested by the police. ARS Occitanie has announced that it has asked the management of the Gérard-Marchant hospital to open an administrative investigation and has launched an inspection mission. Thursday, a third psychiatric patient had escaped from another establishment in Toulouse, the Purpan hospital, before being found a few hours later in the city center to be brought back to the hospital. In 2017, he deliberately ran into three Chinese students driving his car in a locality on the outskirts of Toulouse.