The student who stabbed to death his Spanish teacher, Agnès Lassalle, on Wednesday February 22, in Saint-Jean-de-Luz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) was indicted for “murder” and placed in pre-trial detention, a announced, Friday, February 24, the public prosecutor of Bayonne, Jérôme Bourrier. The young man will be imprisoned “in a place whose destination must be kept confidential”, said his lawyer, Me Thierry Sagardoytho, after the presentation to the magistrates of the 16-year-old teenager. “It’s a facility that will take into account both his youth, and the care he needs,” he said.
“We are talking about a young person unknown to the judicial and educational radars, who suddenly took action, at the cost of personal motivations that I forbid myself to put in the public square but which need to be probed, appreciated, tested by psychiatrists,” to determine whether his discernment was “full,” or “on the contrary abolished, or possibly impaired,” the lawyer said. “It will be necessary to go well beyond the summary examination”, added Mr. Sagardoytho, who said he was “dismayed to read the account” made to the press of the first psychiatric examination of the teenager. in custody.
Thursday, the public prosecutor of Bayonne had declared during a press conference that this first examination had revealed “a form of reactive anxiety which could disturb his discernment” and “elements of depression evolving for a year”, but ” no mental illness such as schizophrenia, manic state, melancholia or mental retardation, nor acute psychiatric decompensation”. “The adolescent appears accessible to criminal liability subject to the expertise that will have to be ordered and a possible alteration of his discernment,” added the prosecutor.
For the lawyer, this expertise “completely ignores the suicide attempt” of the teenager in October 2022, mentioned by the prosecutor, “and the medical prescriptions of which he was the object”. “It’s not an expertise worthy of the name, it’s an opinion”, added Mr. Sagardoytho, for whom “the truths of today are very likely not to be those of tomorrow”. “Those who know [the teenager] guess that there is a problem”, “a kind of drowning, of intimate suffering which could have led to irreparable damage”, he continued.
“Form of animosity”
Prosecutor Jérôme Bourrier also returned to the facts which took place around 9:45 a.m. in a classroom at Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin high school during a Spanish lesson. The suspect allegedly got up in the middle of class, “grabbed a roll of paper towel”, then “approached the classroom door which he locked”. He then walked over to his teacher and pulled out “a kitchen knife with an eighteen centimeter blade”, with which he struck the teacher in the chest. The gesture, according to the witnesses present on the spot, was “quick, fluid and without hesitation”, had further explained the prosecutor. According to the first conclusions of the autopsy, a single violent blow, “fatal”, was given to the teacher, who could not be saved by the emergency services.
The respondent, who would have remained standing as a result of the facts, “as if flabbergasted”, was taken care of by other members of the teaching staff in an adjoining room. “I ruined my life, it’s all over,” said the teenager, who “would have reported someone taking possession of his body”, revealed Mr. Bourrier. “During custody, the respondent reported a small voice speaking to him. A being he describes as selfish, manipulative, egocentric, who incites him to do evil and who would have suggested to him, the day before, to commit an assassination, ”continued the prosecutor.
“He also reported acts of harassment of which he would have been the victim in his previous establishment and which would have affected him a lot (…). He had made a drug suicide attempt in October 2022 “and had since been prescribed antidepressants, Mr. Bourrier said.
According to the first elements of the investigation, the suspect would also have been affected by an argument the day before with a comrade. He also admitted to a “form of animosity towards his Spanish teacher”. Mr. Bourrier had nevertheless affirmed that the student was not known to the judicial services and his educational team for acts of violence.
