On the night of March 31 to April 1, 2019, five residents of the Ehpad la Chêneraie de Lherm, south of Toulouse, died after swallowing their evening meal. A lightning food poisoning which had led to the hospitalization of many other residents of this retirement home, bought two months earlier by the Korian group.
Four years after the opening of a judicial investigation, the chef of the establishment at the time of the facts was indicted on Friday for homicide and involuntary injury and endangering the lives of others, indicates the prosecution From toulouse. And others should follow in this case, where the investigation had quickly pointed to breaches of hygiene rules, in particular on the cleanliness of a mixer, but also malfunctions in the breaking of the cold and hot chain.
A locker unit, called a “ladder”, in which dishes should have been kept at a certain heat before being distributed on the floors, did not work, despite requests made by staff to change it and the audits which had pointed out the failures.
A victim still not cremated
“We would have liked us to start with the managers of the Korian group, with the principals rather than with the fuses. They weren’t the ones who could change the equipment, put in additional staff, they did with the means at hand, perhaps not well either, but they weren’t given the means for reasons of economy and profit, “criticizes Nicolas Raynaud de Lage, lawyer for one of the victim’s families. For him, “it is a system” which is to be pointed out in this file, and not just “lampists”. What Victor Castanet’s book-investigation denounced, The Gravediggers.
An opinion shared by Alexandra Bernard, whose grandmother Geneviève died that day. For four years, she has challenged all the elected officials she meets, even speaking directly to the Keeper of the Seals in person during one of her visits to the region last year.
“There is a leaden screed, nothing moves. After four years, we barely see the beginning of anything. My father, who is 74, says he will never see the trial, ”despairs the forty-year-old, who regularly visited her “granny”. A question that is all the more important for his family since they have been waiting for four years to be able to cremate the body of their loved one.
“If an autopsy were to be requested again by the courts, it could not be done. In the meantime, grandma is in a depository, a temporary vault, in the cemetery”, indicates the Toulousaine, for whom “it is not possible to mourn”.
She has remained in contact with the other families of victims and all of them now find that the investigation time is beyond reasonable, especially since everyone remembers the commitments of Agnès Buzyn, who had committed on day of the drama that “all transparency is done”.