“You were right, I’m too scared of you to tell you to your face. […] I wouldn’t suffer any more of your violence. I took my decision. I like someone who attacks me, hits me, spits on me, strangles me and insults me. I feel dead. Read by the president of the Assize Court of the Alpes-Maritimes on Monday morning, the last message from Salomé Garnesson to her companion resonates like a gloomy omen. It dates from July 11, 2019. The last day the 21-year-old was able to use her phone. She wanted to put an end to this relationship which had cut her off from the rest of the world. A month and a half later, on the morning of August 31, his bruised, swollen body was found rolled up in a carpet, under a pile of rubbish, near the Cagnes-sur-Mer station.
The previous night, Amin Mimouni, then 26 years old, with whom she had been in a relationship for nine months, allegedly beat her to death. He had always denied, explaining that there had indeed been an argument, he had just left her, but that she was very much alive when they had separated. Monday at the opening of the trial in which he appears for aggravated murder, he ended up confessing: “I recognize the facts”, he let go in a weak voice.
“A young man is massacring a girl”
The details just shared by court president Catherine Bonnici were overwhelming. This night in the summer of 2019, in rue Garigliano, in Cagnes-sur-Mer, an argument and screams wake up a whole family. The mother describes the scene live to the emergency police, by telephone: “A young man is massacring a girl. She screams to death. The victim is beaten up, strangled. His executioner jumps on his stomach with both feet together, hits his head against the asphalt. Unsustainable.
In the room, relatives of Salomé Garnesson, some of whom wear a T-shirt printed with a photo of the young woman, smiling, wipe away tears. A woman, face lowered, covers her ears. Others turn, glaring, towards the accused, whose description fits perfectly with that made then by the witnesses of the murder: “half-breed, 1.80 m, frizzy hair combed in a bun”. Arms crossed in a jacket with colorful patterns, a pair of glasses on his nose, Amin Mimouni does not react.
She could only be identified by her DNA.
This outburst of violence will have been such that the father of the young woman, whose death is linked to a cranio-facio-cervical trauma according to the conclusions of the pathologist, will not be able to identify her. Only a comparison of their two DNAs will make it possible to formally confirm that it was indeed Salomé.
The body of the young woman will only be found by a passerby several hours later, a little before noon, where the murderer had dragged and abandoned the body. A police crew, who arrived a few minutes after the call from the mother, who witnessed the scene, had detected nothing. However, they had met Amin Mimouni, who was heading back towards his mother’s home, where the couple was living a few dozen meters away. Their intervention, criticized, had given him to an investigation by the IGPN, at the end of which one of the police officers had received a reprimand.
A young woman under the influence
His death, at the end of the summer of 2019, had aroused a wave of emotion and indignation throughout France. Considered the 100th victim of feminicide that year, the young woman was killed four days before the opening of the Grenelle against domestic violence. And the investigation had made it possible to trace the contours of a toxic relationship, Salomé Garnesson being under the influence of Amin Mimouni.
Witnesses explained that she no longer wears makeup, that she had to wear loose clothes. He had all his access codes to his social networks. He had even ended up depriving her of the telephone. The influence was almost complete. Displaying an exacerbated jealousy to the point of watching her for long hours at the bakery where she worked after having abandoned her studies a few months after the start of their relationship, he suspected her of cheating on him. She ended up wanting to leave him. Amin Mimouni, a “narcissistic” man according to a psychiatric expert held to testify on Monday, would not have supported it.
Salome was “called back to God” according to him
“He said he was in love, but for him love is perhaps belonging”, detailed the expert who did not detect “any pathology” in him. She still explains that he “has no empathy for the victim” and that he can present a “social dangerousness”, with a risk of recidivism. The accused, in whom there is a “certain trivialization of violence” had already been the subject of a complaint, filed by an ex-girlfriend in 2016, and finally dismissed. The investigators also found several handrails filed by Amin Mimouni’s mother against him.
According to a psychologist also questioned by the court in the afternoon, the accused would be very virulent against his former companions, whom he treated as “little piles of shit”, even more than a year after the murder of Salomé Garnesson.
Beaten by his father when he was a child and in conflict with his mother, according to the personality survey, also addicted to cannabis, the man also questions his relationship to religion. In letters sent during his detention to the investigating judge, the man who calls himself a Muslim, practicing for two years with “seven prayers a day” but who has not been reported for radicalization, wrote that the young woman had been “called back to God”. “By whose will was Salome recalled? By whose will did Salome lose her life? “asked him several times the president of the assize court. “The facts, I recognize them and I apologize for them” but “I do not answer questions relating to religion”, he replied, annoyed. The verdict is expected Friday.