Two days after investigators recovered a body near where Erwan was last seen, the results of the autopsy cast doubt on the identity of the body but nevertheless make it possible to determine the probable cause of death.
The investigation is far from over! On Thursday April 4, a body was recovered from the river running along the town of Moncoutant-sur-Sèvre where Erwan was last seen on the night of February 10 to 11. The 18-year-old young man had spent part of the evening with friends before going to the La Morinière club from which he was excluded, visibly drunk according to what several witnesses reported. The videos from surveillance cameras also did not make it possible to understand what happened to Erwan afterwards…
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One of his best friends – Mattéo – suggested that Erwan wasn’t quite in a normal state that evening. “We weren’t completely stoned, we just had a little heat”he had suggested to The New Republicbefore putting forward his own hypotheses regarding the disappearance of his friend. “He could have been drugged, which I don’t want to think, because that means there was kidnapping, but nothing can be ruled out now”he added shortly after the opening of an investigation into a worrying disappearance by the Niort public prosecutor’s office, describing the young adult as “golden guy” moreover.
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Known causes of death
We can only imagine the pain of Mattéo and his friends when he learned that a body had indeed been recovered earlier this week and that it was carrying Erwan’s identity papers. But the first autopsy results do not allow us to affirm that it is indeed him. This is what Niort public prosecutor Julien Wattebledle declared on Friday April 5, based on a report from the Poitiers forensic institute. The relatives of the deceased will have to be patient since “genetic samples were taken to confirm the identity of the deceased” and the results are not expected to be known until “middle of next week”we emphasize.
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Furthermore, the public prosecutor indicated that a hypothesis concerning the causes of death was favored at this stage of the investigation. In his press release, he reveals that the autopsy “did not reveal any lesion suggestive of violence, seizure, constraint or defense which could raise suspicion of the violent intervention of a third party”which amounts to making it known that “the main hypothesis is one death by drowning“.
Several cases of drowning recorded in recent months
If this were the case, Erwan would not be the first young man to drown after spending an evening with friends. A few weeks ago, Maeva fell into the water very close to the port of Le Havre on New Year’s Eve. Further back in time, in the Loire which runs through the city of Nantes, the bodies of Yann Bougaran and Yuri Diagne were similarly recovered after their disappearance was reported. Finally, just this week, the authorities discovered the body of Pablo, also 18 years old, in a river in Vienne.
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The week was also punctuated by other macabre discoveries particularly publicized as part of the investigations concerning the disappearance of a couple from Tarn-et-Garonne in Portugal and that of young Émile, aged two and a half years old at the time he had vanished on July 8, 2023. Bones were found near his grandparents’ home, around the hamlet of Haut-Vernet (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence).
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