He would be one of the last two people to see Emile alive, just minutes before his mysterious disappearance. On Saturday July 8, 2023, at 6:12 p.m., the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence gendarmerie received a call from a grandmother who claimed that her two-and-a-half-year-old grandson had not been found for nearly 45 minutes. And since then, no trace of the child. Many research sessions have been carried out on the steep terrain of Haut-Vernet, a small hamlet of 25 souls where the family holiday home is located. Rescuers, dogs, drones and helicopters traveled around to find Emile, in vain. An investigation was quickly opened in “search for the causes of the disappearance”. Monday, August 21, after more than a month and a half without progress, the legal proceedings took a turn when the public prosecutor of Aix-en-Provence decided to reclassify it as “arbitrary kidnapping, arrest, detention, and sequestration of a 15-year-old minor”.
Is his testimony reliable?
Since the beginning, a good part of the investigation has been based on the testimonies of two inhabitants of Haut-Vernet, who claim to have seen the little blond boy around 5:15 p.m. One of them is a retiree in his sixtiesas revealed Paris Match July 20. At that time, the man did not raise the alarm. And this, for two very simple reasons: on the one hand, the village is a peaceful place where it is not rare (and therefore not worrying), to see a child playing alone in the street; and on the other hand, his dog, a Bernese shepherd, did not bark. Because he “knows very well that when a stranger moves around, or when danger threatens, his dog reacts systematically”, explained our colleagues. This is where things get complicated: the pensioner had forgotten a crucial detail, namely that “that day, his dog was not there”. Nevertheless, his account and that of the other witness, a teenager from the village, “appear reliable in the eyes of the gendarmes”. In any case, this was assured The Parisian in an article published on August 8. Moreover, the sexagenarian again confirmed his remarks to the Ile-de-France newspaper: “I know what I saw.”
According to him, he would have spotted Emile going down a steep street, on which the family house overlooks, towards the center of the hamlet. Moreover, it is precisely near a fountain located below this street that the Saint-Hubert dogs of the gendarmerie spotted the last trace of the little boy, about sixty meters from the house of his grandparents. . What corroborate the testimony of the pensioner. But one sad detail: it would seem that his version contradicts that of the second witnessa 16-year-old teenager, who “thinks rather to have seen it go up, towards the mountainous paths”as revealed The New Detective in a survey also published on August 8. It is therefore difficult to disentangle the true from the false in this case. From now on, everything rests on the shoulders of the Marseille research section and the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence gendarmerie group, who have been working tirelessly for 46 days now to find out what happened to little Emile.