He will sleep in jail. The sophomore who stabbed his 52-year-old Spanish teacher on Wednesday in the private Catholic high school of Saint Thomas Aquinasin Saint-Jean-de-Luz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) was indicted for murder and placed in pre-trial detention, his lawyer Me Thierry Sagardoytho announced on Friday.
He will be imprisoned “in a place whose destination must be kept confidential”, he added after the presentation to the magistrates of the 16-year-old teenager. “It’s an establishment that will take into account both its youth and the care it needs. »
“We are talking about a young person unknown to the judicial and educational radars, who suddenly took action, at the cost of personal motivations that I refrain from putting in the public square but which need to be probed, appreciated, tested by psychiatrists”, in order to determine whether his discernment was “complete”, or “on the contrary abolished, or possibly altered”.
Go “beyond the summary examination” on the psychiatric component
“It will be necessary to go well beyond the summary examination”, added the lawyer who said he was “frightened to read the report” made to the press of the first psychiatric examination of which the teenager was the subject. in custody.
Thursday, the public prosecutor in Bayonne, Jérôme Bourrier, had declared that this first examination had revealed “a form of reactive anxiety which could disturb his discernment” and “elements of depression evolving for a year”, but “no mental illness schizophrenia, manic state, melancholy or mental retardation, or acute psychiatric decompensation”.
“The adolescent appears accessible to criminal liability subject to the expertise which will have to be ordered and a possible alteration of his discernment”, added the prosecutor.
For the lawyer, this expertise “completely ignores the suicide attempt” of the teenager in October 2022, mentioned by the prosecutor, “and the medical prescriptions of which he was the object”. “It is not an expertise worthy of the name, it is an opinion”, added Me Sagardoytho for whom “the truths of today are very likely not to be those of tomorrow”.
“I do not want to paint the portrait of a young man of whom I do not have the competence to say what he is suffering from (…) but many of those who know him guess that there is a problem”, ” a kind of drowning, of intimate suffering which could have led to irreparable damage,” he continued. According to him, the parents of the young man are “stunned” and “crushed”.