She admits to having “difficulty [se] consider as a victim”, despite the post-traumatic stress disorder which handicaps his daily life. A police commander who was never able to return to work following her intervention after the Nice attack in 2016 deplored Thursday at trial the “culpable indifference” of her hierarchy.
“I would like my testimony to serve my ministry to become aware of its culpable indifference to our fate”, launched Laure Sarraillon before the special assize court of Paris, in reference to all the “first responders” that evening. .
This 51-year-old woman, who worked in the police for 22 years, including 16 in Nice, was not on duty on July 14, 2016. She immediately volunteered when she received the first information of a “terrible accident” on the Promenade des Anglais, around 10:30 p.m. The attack left 86 dead and more than 450 injured.
“I smelled the smell of blood”
Arrived at the police station at 11:10 p.m., she is responsible for managing the command center and “interfacing with the staff of the Marseille judicial police” and the intelligence services. “I remember the screams of my colleagues on the airwaves, and the cries behind them”, says this mother of three children.
She also remembers the call announcing the identity of the assailant, another warning of the death of their colleague, Commissioner Emmanuel Groult, and those, many, of people looking for relatives. In the early morning, she is sent on the promenade to complete this two-kilometre-long crime scene with barriers, while onlookers and journalists are still trying to cross the barriers.
“For the first time in my career, I smelled blood. I was totally paralyzed by the certainty that there was nothing alive around me, ”adds the former police officer. She evokes the “perceptible despair” of her colleagues in forensic identification who made the findings. With all the “tenderness” possible, she asks the families still present with their dead to leave the scene, to allow the scientific police to do their job. It also accompanies mortuary vehicles. “The number and the state of the bodies that I saw that day, it was unbearable to me”, loose this professional who worked in the direction of public security, yet accustomed to car accidents and the announcement bad news to loved ones.
First responders “who suffer in silence”
Rubbing shoulders with these dead “without identity”, without “connection with families”, gave rise to a feeling of “helplessness”, she says. “I especially have in mind the body of a little boy, who was wearing the same Decathlon outfit as the one I had just bought for my son”.
After going back to work as if nothing had happened, he was gradually invaded by sleep disorders, then difficulty breathing, nausea, anxiety attacks. “At no time did anyone in the hierarchy bother to find out how I was or to invite me to the debriefings,” she regrets. After her work stoppage in January 2017, she said she had not received more support: “My hierarchy found nothing better than to impose a transfer on me” and “the only time I was called , last year, it was to tell me to come and get my things”.
“I am thinking of all my colleagues […] who suffer in silence […] whereas we were in charge neither of the decision nor of the implementation of the devices”, she concludes, in reference to the numerous criticisms against the lack of security that evening.