A journalist of Belarusian origin, Claire has worked at Purepeople since 2019. A die-hard fan of the series Sex And The City, she also knows by heart most of the RnB sounds of the 90s and 2000s. A romantic and eternal dreamer, she is particularly interested in the love lives of stars.
Convinced that they could find little Émile when he disappeared in July 2023, hundreds of people went to Haut-Vernet to start searches. After 48 hours of fruitless searches, a police officer suddenly decided to stop this citizen initiative, admitting that he had surely made a “mistake”…
“We may have made a mistake…”: A police officer points out a fault in the investigation into the disappearance of Émile
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On July 8, 2023, Émile suddenly disappeared in the commune of Haut-Vernet while he was still playing a few moments earlier in his grandparents’ garden. Aged two and a half, the little boy seems to have vanished into thin air without leaving a trace. Immediately, A huge wave of solidarity was set up, with hundreds of people coming from all over France to try to find the little boy.
“All over the country, there are people who have taken days off to come. There are companies that have asked their employees to take days off to be able to participate in the hunts.” specifies a podcast BFMTV concerning the disappearance of little Émile. But unfortunately, This surge of solidarity will ultimately become a real obstacle for the investigation and the citizen searches are quickly interrupted.
A witness says: “Nothing is well organized. Volunteers are excluded, there is a policeman who decides to stop the searches because he judges that It’s a bit too much cacophony. In the fields, people don’t know where to start, they don’t know the area. So of course, they go anywhere in the mountains, they’re not in tight ranks like the military usually do on this kind of hunt and then, above all, Some people tend to litter the scene, meaning we find cigarette butts, we find cell phones… All of these items need to be analyzed, but it turns out that they are phones that were lost by citizens who were participating.”
A fatal “error” for the investigation?
The army therefore chooses to maintain targeted research alone, as we always learn via the podcast. BFM TV. “A source close to the investigation said: ‘We may have made a mistake in sending so many people. on a very small perimeter with a radius of 2 km² from the start. It may have put a spanner in the works for the investigators to have so many people in a small area. and a scene that was polluted by cigarette butts, lost cell phones and people running around..” Error or not, this is a question that will remain forever unanswered…