In less than eight days, Toulouse had run away from home three times. And lots of questions. Two men left the Gérard-Marchant psychiatric hospital, then another the Purpan University Hospital. Three men considered very dangerous arrested after several hours spent in the city center.
The series begins Wednesday, January 19. That day, Jérémy Rimbaud, known as “the cannibal of the Pyrenees”, crossed the walls of the Gérard-Marchant hospital center, where around forty patients, irresponsible criminals, were followed, like him, in a care unit of “non-confinement “. A few hours later, this former soldier, declared criminally irresponsible after the murder and acts of cannibalism on a nonagenarian in 2013, attacked an elderly person in the center of Toulouse. After fracturing both his arms, he was stopped by neighbors alerted by the cries of the old lady, before being arrested by the police. Witnesses to the assault describe it “in a daze, then strangely calm when arrested”. An investigation for attempted murder has since been opened by the Toulouse prosecutor’s office in order to continue the investigations and to verify the responsibility of the author at the time of the events.
The following Sunday, a 48-year-old man, prosecuted in 2010 in a case of attempted murder of a homosexual, also leaves the Gérard-Marchant establishment. He was arrested a few hours later in a drunken state by an anti-crime squad patrol. The next day, after a brief episode of decompensation, he smashes the furniture in his room. The two men are being treated for schizophrenia in the establishment and had been granted leave, despite their dangerousness.
An expected report
Following these two cases, the general management of the regional health agency (ARS) announced that it was diligent “an inspection mission and an administrative investigation on site to ensure the compliance of the care of these patients”. A report on the circumstances of these events should ensure the compliance of the management of these patients. Contacted, the ARS did not respond.
In the columns of The Midi Dispatch, the director of the Gérard-Marchant hospital center, Bruno Madelpuech, declares that the establishment welcomes “fragile, vulnerable people, who may have a past or a present of precariousness, incarceration, difficult family situation”. “We did not find any dysfunction in the way the teams took care of these patients”, adds the director, who announced the transfer of Jérémy Rimbaud to a unit for difficult patients (UMD), in Albi, in the Tarn. “It is not a secret to say that public psychiatry needs resources for these situations, it is a public service mission which must not be sacrificed”, explain to World doctors Pascal Marie and Jérôme Boucard, president and vice-president of the establishment’s medical commission (CME).
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