Rude awakening
Members of the Affaire Emile Soleil Facebook group had just wished each other a happy Easter when the news broke, on March 31: the skull and teeth of “little Emile” were found the day before, near the hamlet of Haut-Vernet ( Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), where the child disappeared on July 8, 2023, at the age of 2 and a half. The information gave a boost to the buzzing activity, since the summer, of this private page, which has 2,900 members and allows the exchange of press articles, questions about the investigation and theories – sometimes crazy – about this affair which fascinates France. The place to be, incontestably: the child’s maternal grandmother is a member of the group and its administrator claims to be in contact with his mother.
Hiker in the viewfinder
The circumstances of the discovery of these bones by a walker, who brought the child’s skull back to her home before entrusting it to the gendarmerie, aroused emotion among the members of the group, who spread suspicious comments on the gesture of this woman: “Weird”, “fishy”, “mind-blowing”… They know, having already watched detective series, that you should never touch a crime scene, at the risk of polluting it. “So we don’t blame the hiker, defends a moderator. Maybe his phone wasn’t picking up or had no battery.. Leave the skull with the risk of it disappearing? Under the influence of emotion, what would we have done? »
The shadow of a doubt
Tuesday April 2, the Aix-en-Provence prosecutor, Jean-Luc Blachon, in charge of the investigation, specified that clothes worn by Emile during his disappearance were found 150 meters from where the skull was located. . “Big discovery! “, a member of the group immediately bursts into flames. If the magistrate clarified that all hypotheses remain open, some budding investigators conclude in favor of the accident. Others point out that the postmortem bite marks on the skull indicate that the remains could have been moved by animals. “As if by chance”, underlines a third, more suspicious, this episode comes two days after a reconstruction organized by the investigators, with the seventeen people present at the time of the tragedy.
Breadwinner
Touched by the family’s distress, the members of the group wondered about the opportunity to launch a fundraiser to help the parents pay for the funeral of their little boy. The initiative finally saw the light of day, but on another page: Let’s pray for Emile (24,800 members), who has served, for more than nine months, as a place of online contemplation. The child’s mother, a traditionalist Catholic, communicated religious messages there on several occasions. More than three hundred people have donated so far to“help give Emile a beautiful burial” And “masses for his family”. The amount collected is not known.