The numbers were already incredible, they weren’t even complete. According to our colleagues from France Bleu Occitanie, two new escapes from the Gérard-Marchant psychiatric hospital in Toulouse were concealed by the management of the establishment in the midst of a media storm. It is therefore not three, but five patients who would have run away in the space of ten days.
According to the local media, which explains that it consulted official documents, two patients would indeed have fled the establishment on January 22, a “potentially dangerous” found a few hours later and another “went to a friend’s house in Rodez, found the next day”. These two new escapes have not been the subject of any official communication from the management of the psychiatric hospital.
In order, a first patient ran away on January 19: a 34-year-old former soldier, nicknamed the “cannibal of the Pyrenees”, escaped from Marchant hospital 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 escapes of two other patients with dangerous profiles followed. One took place on January 23, the man was found a few hours later in Toulouse. The other occurred on Friday, with an arrest on Saturday evening in Paris. To these three patients, we must therefore add the two “hidden escapes” of January 22.
“Law of the Series”
A maddening “law of series”, recognized Eric Dupond-Moretti during a visit to the region last Thursday. The Minister of Justice spoke at the microphone of France Bleu “failures” by hastening to return the ball to Olivier Véran, Minister of Health. The ARS has also announced that it has asked the management of the Marchant hospital to open an administrative investigation and has launched an inspection mission.
The director of the establishment began by defending himself from everything “dysfunction”. The hospital then battened down the hatches, in submarine mode. A final statement issued Friday evening was content to announce that the doors of the establishment would remain closed for the duration of the weekend “given the risks of new runaways in a context of overmediatization”. These measures involved, among other things, “Securing entrances and exits” and “strengthening patient monitoring”.
Last Thursday, a psychiatric patient escaped from another establishment in Toulouse, the Purpan hospital. He was finally found a few hours later in the city center and taken back to the hospital. In 2017, he deliberately ran into three Chinese female students driving his car in a locality on the outskirts of the city.