The parents of little Gabin accused of "deprivation of care or food followed by the death of a 15-year-old minor by parentage or person in authority" were sentenced to sixteen and fourteen years in prison.
This Friday, September 18, the parents of little Gabin were sentenced on appeal to 16 years in prison for the mother and fourteen years for the father. These sentences are slightly less than the seventeen years of imprisonment which they each received at the end of 2019.
In June 2013, Gabin died of hunger and thirst at the age of 22 months. He weighed only 5.825 kg at the time, the weight of a three-month-old child. An investigation then noted the state of filthiness and extreme thinness of the child whose "we could count the ribs". The little boy suffered from cachexia that is, the disappearance of fatty tissues and muscles caused by extreme dehydration and undernutrition which deeply weakens the body.
On the day of the child's death, his father had taken him to the emergency room, no longer seeing "her belly moving". The emergency doctor then attempted a cardiac massage but the child was already dead. The doctor then admitted to remembering having been "struck, by the state of thinness of the child " but also by theindifference of parents.
After Gabin's death, his parents, separated but still living under the same roof, had acknowledged shortcomings but denied any responsibility. Later, Céline Vialette, 35, and Edouard Ruaud, 41, were accused of "deprivation of care or food followed by the death of a 15-year-old minor by parentage or person in authority".
According to the president of the Court of Appeal of Haute-Vienne, Maryse Le Men Régnier, the mother of the little boy has come a long way about his responsibility since his incarceration. “For ten months that I have been incarcerated, I have been working with psychologists to understand what happened. I was not well at the time. There was no communication between us anymore. I think we did. 'forgot a lot.", Céline Vialette explained.
"Feeding a child is what every parent expects. It is the foundation", however affirmed Me Yves Crespin, lawyer of the association Enfant bleu-Enfance maltreated, the only civil party, during his plea. According to him, the child is dead "because of selfishness" of his parents. "She preferred to leave with her lover, and to leave him in his addictions", he added.
When to Me Chloé Bonnat, Céline Vialette's lawyer, she assures that her client is not a "child murderer". "Physiologically he died of hunger and thirst but humanly he died of misery and abandonment", she confided in denouncing the failures and the slowness of the investigation and the justice in this case.
In his indictment, Advocate General Claude Derens, asked the jurors to follow the 2019 verdict and not to make a distinction between the sentence between the parents: "The slow agony of the child is the result of uncoordinated action but of criminal co-action. They have an identical part and to do them a different fate would be a mistake." Céline Vialette would thus be in the misunderstanding of this dissociation of sentence. "She really expected to be sentenced to an equal sentence, she does not understand why she is more responsible than him. It should be noted that when the child made the malaise which was fatal to her, Mrs. V. . was not present. ", revealed his lawyer to France Bleu.
A telephone number, 119, as well as the site www.allo119.gouv.fr are available 7 days a week and 24 hours a day for any child or adolescent victim of violence or to anyone concerned about a situation of violence. child in danger or at risk of being so.