The day after the discovery of a fivefold family murder, the shaken inhabitants of the small town of Douvres in Ain try to reconstruct the facts.
The police roadblocks are still there but around the streets are deserted: the day after the discovery of a fivefold family murder, the shaken inhabitants of the small town of Douvres in Ain try to reconstruct the facts. “People are crazy (…) what’s going on in their head?” Worries Marina Morabito, 28. “I am the mother of a little boy and I say to myself + but how can a child do this to his family? +”, chokes this order picker residing near this neighboring village of Ambérieu-en-Bugey. “Shocked that it’s happening here”, confides to AFP Hervé, sitting shirtless on pallets, who, like many inhabitants, is reluctant to decline his identity. “Because Dover is quiet, we are a quiet little village, everyone knows each other, we are a family”, describes the bearded 30-year-old cook, who once helped install electricity in the victim’s house.
The five members of a blended family were killed by a relative in his twenties, who was fatally injured on Wednesday by the GIGN. He had holed up in the house all night, stubbornly refusing to surrender. Armed with a long-barreled rifle and a katana (Japanese sword), he “would have suffered from psychiatric disorders”, according to the Bourg-en-Bresse prosecutor’s office, which has not yet specified the age of the victims, nor their precise family ties with the perpetrator. According to the mayor of this village of a thousand inhabitants Christian Limousin, there are two adults and three children. This family had resided in the house since July 2020.
“It’s a tragedy,” laments Pascale, 55, hands clasped behind her back and a lump in her throat. “What I wonder is ‘what pushes a young person to do that'”, blows this resident of the village for three years. An acquaintance of the family told AFP that the perpetrator of the killing was 22 years old and worked in a fast food restaurant in a nearby town.
The madman was “determined”
The madman, taking refuge in a closed room in the pavilion, was “determined”, said the public prosecutor, Christophe Rode. Despite “several summons sent” for him to lay down his arms, the young man advanced in the direction of the gendarmes who then used “four times their weapons”. Paramedics tried to revive him, but he died twenty minutes later. In this village in the natural region of Bas Bugey, located between Lyon and Geneva, what happened “can disturb” and “raise a lot of questions”, testifies for his part Hugo Sanial, employed in the prefabricated concrete.
“It’s a particular situation” and “putting words on how we live it”, it’s “complicated”, admits the 21-year-old young man, cap and arms crossed. “We were scared,” acknowledges laconically Serge Grinand, 60, when the GIGN gendarmes, armed and dressed in bulletproof vests, arrived. “It’s sad,” said this commercial with graying hair, a resident of Dover “forever”. “I was surprised when I heard the news, because, in the village, there has always been a good atmosphere”, certifies Tania, 35, owner since March of the bar-pizzeria of the Babillière on the place of Dover . “In any case, they weren’t people from the bar, I didn’t know them”.
This drama is one of the deadliest family killings in France in recent years. The prosecution has opened an investigation into intentional homicides. A second investigation will focus on the use of their weapons by the GIGN gendarmes.