Rémi Vandeville, 29 years old today, with a clean record, is on trial from this Thursday by the Savoie Assize Court, in Chambéry, for attempted murder of one of his former best friends, Clément, while they studied together at Sciences po Lyon.
The story dates back to September 3, 2016, around 5 a.m. Clément, 20, leaves his home in Chambéry to go to work. A hooded and armed man advances towards him and forces him to get into the trunk of a car. The individual drives a few kilometers then stops in the middle of the forest, near Sonnaz. He asks the student to kneel and shoots him in the back. Despite the deep wound, he is alive.
The kidnapper orders his victim to get back into the trunk, he drives a few more kilometers before reaching the town of Méry. He stops there, opens the trunk and says to the injured young man: “get out of there,” before driving off and leaving it there. The victim managed to take refuge in a home to ask for help. Operated then transferred to the intensive care unit, Clément escaped, the bullet having passed through his body, without hitting any vital organ.
A “suffocating” friendship
At that moment, the student has no idea that the person who has just tried to kill him is none other than his friend, Rémi. The two young men met a year earlier, at Sciences po Lyon, as recalled West France. The friendship that Rémi feels for Clément seems to change to the point where the second reproaches the first for becoming “stifling” and suspects him of having fallen in love with him, without reciprocity.
According to the indictment order, relayed by The Parisian, he had planned to “attack” him and then “kill himself”. That evening, he drove all night from the North, where he is from, in his mother’s car, and used a pistol from his collection of World War II weapons. He ultimately did not kill himself and went the other way home. To his mother, he told his mother that he had seen his friend shot because of a story about selling gold. She was the one who brought him to the police station the day after the incident.
Placed in police custody, Rémi admitted to having shot his friend, “giving explanations […] very blurry [e] s”, according to the Chambéry public prosecutor’s office at the time. The accused could not have tolerated “the idea of being separated” from Clément, who was to go to Egypt for a year to continue his studies. For the accused, it was a “new abandonment” after that of his father, in 2010, and the death of his grandfather, in 2015. His death then represented “the only attempt to resolve a deadlocked situation “.
Psychiatrists considered that the young man suffered from a “disorder […] likely to impair one’s discernment.” He would have created with his “friend” a “relationship of dependence with almost romantic connotations, unique, ideal”, relates again The Parisian. Rémi faces life imprisonment. The verdict will be delivered on Friday.