She suffered from auditory and visual hallucinations since 2017. Joëlle, aged 85, died on February 25, found dead in a container at Aix-en-Provence hospital. Ten days after the tragedy, his daughter Claudine is the guest of Dimitri Pavlenko. At the microphone of Europe 1, she says.
“I got a call from the hospital telling me that my mom escaped from the emergency room”
In October 2023, doctors diagnosed Joëlle with Lewy body disease. “It’s a disease that brings together the symptoms of auditory and visual hallucinations of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The symptoms are random. She could be very well in the morning, in good shape and completely conscious. And then after- At midday, she could go crazy or have irrepressible tremors,” explains her daughter Claudine. About forty days before her death, Joëlle experienced a period of crises. Her psychiatrist then advises Claudine to increase her dosage and then take her to the emergency room. “The psychiatric hospital could no longer take care of her directly since it was no longer a matter of psychiatry, but of neurology,” explains Claudine who decides to follow the doctor’s advice.
The two women arrived at the Aix-en-Provence hospital on Friday February 23 around 1 p.m. At 7:30 p.m., Joëlle, who has still not been treated by the emergency room, asks her daughter for a drink. As she goes to get a soda, her mother is picked up and taken to an emergency room. When she returns, she is not allowed to stay and must return to her home in Meyreuil, at the request of the hospital. 45 minutes after arriving home, the establishment called her and told her that her mother had disappeared. “At 9:49 p.m., I got a call from the hospital telling me that my mom escaped from the emergency room,” she says.
“If they had let me go into the box with her, she would still be alive”
Panicked, Claudine rushes back to the hospital and asks to watch the surveillance camera videos. According to his testimony, due to the absence of the person in charge of video surveillance due to vacation, it was not possible to access these videos. Hospital staff also did not have the codes to view the images. Claudine wanders through the hospital and its surroundings, in vain.
After a long search, the family, accompanied by firefighters, managed to find the woman in a garbage container in the basement of the establishment, two days after her disappearance. Today, Claudine says she is angry. “I try to dissociate the mourning of my mother and the conditions in which she died. If they had let me go in and get her, if they had let me go into the box with her, she would still be alive. Only cameras are not connected, that an automatic door opener has been broken for six months, that a person can escape the vigilance of the nursing staff so easily, that access to the basement can be possible from any one each… It’s a series of dysfunctions which led to the death of my mother”, concludes Claudine at the microphone of Europe 1. The victim’s family filed a complaint for lack of supervision of the hospital.