This Monday, the Dax criminal court released the Herta company, eight years after the death of Lilian, an almost three-year-old boy suffocated with a piece of knack sausage, in a campsite in the Landes.
“Absence of material observation”
The company Herta, which markets in particular “Knacki”, was released, in accordance with the requisitions of the prosecution on June 20. In the “absence of criminal investigation” at the time of the tragedy, and therefore in the “absence of material observation and autopsy”, “no constituent element of the manslaughter can be characterized”, justified the court in his reasons read at the hearing.
“No breach of a safety rule or lack of recklessness”, “nor causal link” with the death of little Lilian “can therefore not be blamed on the company”, continued the court.
The Herta group was prosecuted for “manslaughter by manifestly deliberate violation of an obligation of safety or prudence”. The company has always refuted the dangerousness of its knacks, while arguing that there was still a doubt about the brand of sausage ingested that day by little Lilian. The company’s lawyer declined to comment. The boy, then aged 2 years and 11 months, died on August 11, 2014 in a campsite in Messanges, on the Landes coast, where his family from Bordeaux was staying in a mobile home. After a few bites of a meal consisting of green beans and sausage knacks cut into slices, Lilian had suffocated and could not be revived by the emergency services despite the immediate intervention of a nurse anesthetist friend and numerous maneuvers: method from Heimlich, pats on the back, suspension by the feet…
A relaxation based more “on form” than on substance
Contacted by AFP, Philippe Courtois, the lawyer for the parents of the boy – Florence and Vincent Lerbey, absent from the deliberations – regretted a release based more “on form” than on substance. “The court could not rule on the lack of information given to the consumer on the risks of choking for young children”, he lamented in particular.
For the lawyer, “the court justifies its release not by the absence of proof of the dangerousness of the product but by the non-completion of a preliminary investigation”.
Lilian’s parents, who had filed a complaint in 2017 against Herta to prevent the tragedy from happening again, saw their request for a symbolic euro rejected.