For the past three days, we have been scrutinizing every look, every hint of movement of Gabriel Fortin. If he raises his head, agrees to raise his nose for a few seconds from the papers on which he keeps scribbling, deigns to approach the microphone, and immediately, a kind of feverishness seizes the courtroom. He was going to speak. Maybe even, who knows, show the fleeting trace of an emotion, the appearance of a crack? We watched her, for example, on the first day of the hearing, Tuesday, June 13, when her mother came to testify.
A mother, on the witness stand of the Assize Court, is always a moment. Even the most hardened of the accused cannot resist it. A look that lights up or turns away, a bent neck, a back that sags in the box, in short, something is happening. The nothing. Not a sign, not a gesture. Francine Fortin could break down in tears, hold out a grief-stricken face to her son, beg him, he didn’t move. Same with his brother. With his former glider instructor, with his ex-partner from engineering school, with Maud, his flirtation from high school whom he had pursued fifteen years later with his assiduity, still the same. A wall.
This reaction from Gabriel Fortin, which none of the witnesses had managed to elicit, the players in the hearing – the president, his assessors, the general counsel, the lawyers for the civil parties, and their two very young colleagues who the heavy load of the defense – then tried, in turn and in all tones, to provoke it.
Thursday June 15, the accused of the triple assassination and the attempted assassination of human resources managers and an employee of Pôle emploi in Nancy and Valence, in January 2021, spoke a little, but he did nothing said – between court reporters, this irrational expectation of a word and our somewhat ridiculous eagerness to note each “no, no, no”, “nothing, nothing, nothing”, or a succession of two unintelligible sentences, evoked another, facing the accused in the trial of the November 2015 attacks.
“Indifference to the fate of others and to one’s own”
Friday, June 16, what remained of hope for “communication” was showered. At the helm came Dr. Thierry Balais, a psychiatrist at the Vinatier hospital center in Lyon, charged with one of his colleagues, to assess the accused. He placed in front of him a very thin file of paper. And for good reason : “Gabriel Fortin refused to speak with us. We stayed face-to-face with him hoping things would work out. We gave up after about thirty minutes to have an exchange.explained the psychiatrist.
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