At the specially composed assize court in Paris,
There was so much light in this courtroom. Bright rays, sometimes very small shards escaped from the words of survivors and relatives of the victims of the attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis. But some days, the night of November 13, 2015 plunged the Assize Court into darkness.
Too much violence, too many deaths, too much grief. This suffering reported at the trial, Guillaume Valette, 31, survivor of the Bataclan attack, could not bear it. Crushed by post-traumatic stress syndrome, this thirty-something committed suicide on November 19, 2017. As a civil party, his family regretted the lack of appropriate care for the “invisible wounds” of victims of terrorism.
“My life will never be the same”
On the evening of November 13, 2015, Guillaume came out of the concert hall unharmed. “He did not receive bullets in the body but he received invisible psychic bullets which slowly but surely killed him”, believes Alain, the father of this scientist and die-hard fan of the band Eagles of death metal. To explain to the court the course of his son, he relied on his testimony taken the same evening by the investigators. And on the words that Guillaume gave them during the night.
Thrown onto the floor of the pit from the start of the attack, he tried to escape when the terrorists reloaded their weapons for the first time. In vain. “He landed in a pile of bodies and tried to protect his head in these bodies”, details Alain, short of breath. In a second impulse, the thirty-something manages to take refuge in a room with other spectators. He will stay there for two hours, until the evacuation of the room by the police.
“He never complained”
“Guillaume saw nothing but heard everything. What haunted him for a long time were the cries of the wounded, the sound of machine guns ”and the image of the bodies seen in the pit as they left the room. When he retrieves it during the night, Alain finds his son “covered in blood, icy, exhausted”. That evening, the young man tells his parents everything and tells them: “My life will never be the same again. “
Arrested for fifteen days, Guillaume is regularly monitored by a psychologist at the Bégin hospital in Val-de-Marne. He resumes his work, but finds it difficult to concentrate. “But he never complained, he wanted to be strong,” Alain remembers. No more cinema, no more concerts, no more evenings with friends, Guillaume “gradually withdraws”, is placed in therapeutic half-time in January 2016 and struggles with the noise of the Kalashnikovs that he cannot forget.
The 131st victim
In the summer of 2017, Guillaume rocked. His post-traumatic stress disorder evolves into “hypochondriac delirium”: “These are the words of psychiatrists. At the time, we were completely helpless, ”says his father. Convinced of suffering from cancer, Guillaume increased his medical examinations. But the results do not reveal any pathology. On July 8, the survivor of the Bataclan wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, terrified. A few days later, a panic attack paralyzes him in his laboratory.
His case worsens, his legs no longer carry him, his parents decide to drive him to the emergency room of the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital. At the helm, Alain then said his feeling of “helplessness”. Transferred to another hospital in Saint-Mandé, Guillaume struggles to get out of his room, leans on his mother when they stroll in the gardens. In the early morning of November 19, 2017, the clinic telephoned his parents. “Guillaume had been found hanged in his room,” breathes Alain.
“His death devastated our family. We mourn every day the son, the brother and the uncle who will not be seen again ”, testifies today his father, who pleads for an improvement of the psychological care. His wife, absent at the hearing, wrote a letter for the attention of the court, read by one of his two sons, Frédéric. “Guillaume was wounded in the war (…) and he should have received specific treatment. I have alerted so many times. But when a mother is worried, we get stuck with an anxious label, ”she laments.
Four years after Guillaume’s death, Christophe, his older brother, still wonders: “Are we weak because we do not accept violence or because we accept it?” “. Standing alongside his father, this bereaved brother would like to thank all the parties who listed the “131 victims of the attacks”, an “important figure for us”. And remembers the words of the deacon, pronounced on the day of his brother’s funeral: “Guillaume committed suicide because he had no choice: he did not want to stop living, he wanted to stop suffering. . “