“I couldn’t take it anymore,” said Ana-Maria Barbosa de Sousa, 37, on appeal until Friday at the Assizes of Saint-Omer in Pas-de-Calais.
Doused with boiling water
“I saw things, but I only thought of myself”, recognizes this discreet woman with her hair wisely pulled back. “I failed to protect my children.” Despite significant social support from this dysfunctional family, little Mélinda died on May 18, 2016 around 2:30 p.m., in Neuf-Mesnil in the North, after being sprayed the night before with hot water by her beau. -dad.
The child had been smeared with moisturizer and put to bed, without anyone calling for help despite her screaming and vomiting. The Samu had not been alerted until noon the next day. Mélinda had been conceived a few days after the burial of her eldest, Joulia, killed by a relative of the family to whom her mother had entrusted her.
Nine pregnancies between 19 and 30 years old
Ana-Maria Barbosa, herself a battered child, has since been given a three-month suspended prison sentence for mistreatment of this other child who died at 21 months. The accused, who has never worked, had 9 pregnancies between the ages of 19 and 30, giving birth to four children. The last, Mélinda, was born when her parents, separated, were forbidden to see each other because of the legal proceedings in progress on the death of her sister.
His mother soon after met a new companion, ten years her junior, Jason Odin. She moved in with him with a man he calls his “uncle”, convicted in the past of pedophile acts and whom Jason Odin accuses of having raped him. The two men were sentenced on October 12, 2020 by the Douai Assize Court and did not appeal.
Jason Odin is serving a 25-year prison sentence for acts of barbarism towards Mélinda, and his host had been sentenced to four years for not having assisted the child.
Ana-Maria Barbosa faces up to 30 years in prison on appeal
The two eldest children of Ana-Maria Barbosa, her mother with whom they are placed and the father of Mélinda, are civil parties to the trial. “We are going to have to relive these facts, it is an unspeakable ordeal,” their adviser, Me Hugo Van Cauwenberge, told AFP. “It’s hard to see the accused posing as a victim. She faces 30 years in prison!”
A psychiatrist described to the jurors the accused as a woman suffering from “emotional debility”, “little empathetic”, and having expressed after the facts “neither remorse, nor regret, nor guilt”. After having initially minimized her responsibility, “she is a woman who evolves in the realization of the facts”, underlines her adviser, Me Fatima En-Nih. “It took him a long time.”