A 35-year-old woman was indicted and imprisoned after being released from the psychiatric hospital for the murder of her 4-year-old son in November in Corcondray (Doubs). The latter was indicted for “intentional homicide on a minor under 15” and placed in pre-trial detention in the Dijon remand center.
The young woman admitted to having “asphyxiated her child”, explaining that “her gesture was closely correlated with the harassment and violence she said she suffered from her husband,” said the prosecutor of Besançon, Etienne Manteaux, during of a press conference. The circumstances of the passage to the act “remain very, very confused”, he added, estimating that his speech was “not very coherent”.
“A kind of paranoia”
“The question of the criminal responsibility of Madam in relation to these facts remains whole”, according to the prosecutor who notes “a kind of paranoia which leads him to see evil everywhere”. The investigations of the gendarmerie and the psychiatric expertises will make it possible to “understand what is his psychic state”, he underlined.
As a reminder, the drama occurred last November. A young woman and her 4-year-old son were discovered by the gendarmerie early in the morning in a ditch in Corcondray, a small town in Doubs where they lived. The child presented traces of trauma on the face and traces of strangulations on the neck. Supported by the emergency services, he died in Besançon hospital in the morning. The autopsy concluded in death from asphyxiation following strangulation.
During the night, the mother had come to several inhabitants of the village with the child, in pajamas and barefoot. She had refused to enter their home and left with her son in tears, in the cold and the fog. The mother had made “rather delusional remarks, with a mystical connotation”, had reported Etienne Manteaux at the time of the facts, and she had been hospitalized in psychiatry. The 35-year-old father was taken into police custody before being released. The couple were in the process of breaking up.