On Wednesday, a 72-year-old lady who was walking her dog was violently attacked by a man with a stick in the Chalets district of Toulouse. She certainly owes her life to a neighbor who heard her cries and stepped in to rescue her, pointing his unloaded gun at the man who knocked her to the ground. This Good Samaritan tried to disarm him, without succeeding, but prevented him from committing irreparable harm until the police arrived.
Because given the antecedents of the aggressor, the outcome could have been fatal. The latter is none other than Jeremy Rimbaud, nicknamed the “cannibal of the Pyrenees” after killing a 90-year-old man in 2013 and eating his heart and tongue. He had escaped a few hours earlier from the Gérard-Marchant psychiatric hospital.
“An investigation for attempted murder has been opened by the Toulouse prosecutor’s office in order to continue the investigations and to verify the responsibility of the author at the time of the commission of the facts, by way of psychiatric expertise”, indicated this Friday the public prosecutor of Toulouse, Samuel Vuelta-Simon.
“Escaped from the vigilance of the staff”
The representative of the prosecution indicates that the former soldier, victim of post-traumatic stress syndrome after going to Afghanistan and subject to paranoid delirium, had been indicted for murder during the events committed in the Hautes-Pyrénées, before that the investigating chamber of the Court of Appeal of Pau declares him “totally irresponsible by decision of July 19, 2016, because of his mental state”.
He was therefore never tried for his acts of cannibalism. Hospitalized since in psychiatric establishments, the 34-year-old man was in Marchant under the regime of “care at the request of a representative of the State”. It was there that he “escaped the vigilance of the staff and left the establishment, without respecting the exit authorizations strictly provided for in his care program”, indicates the Toulouse prosecutor’s office.
The doctor who saw him after his arrest felt that “his state of mental health was not compatible with police custody”. He therefore returned to the hospital. His victim, hospitalized, had broken arms and head wounds. She will be heard next week.
Hautes-Pyrénées: The alleged cannibal, victim of post-traumatic stress after AfghanistanThe alleged cannibal of the Pyrenees indicted