The psychological cell tells of the impact on the inhabitants of the district

“There was no crowd but it still helped calm things down a bit”: this is how Vanda Ferencikova, psychologist at the support unit set up after Lola’s murder, takes stock from his work. This cell was set up at the town hall of the 19th and in the arrondissement for the inhabitants of the district, after the brutal murder of this 12-year-old teenager, in mid-October, and was open until November 12.

The practitioner of the association L’Epoc ensured a permanence at the town hall from the 19th to the end of October. Above all, she saw parents, who “identified themselves with Lola’s parents”. A woman whom this tragedy sent back to her fear as a mother, and to a “mourning that she experienced a long time ago that she thought she had overcome and which was revived by this event”. And a family whose children frequented Lola, and whose daily life “was completely upset by this event”.

“Even their place of living had become unbearable, this event precipitated a desire to move”, details the practitioner. Since then, the parents have organized themselves to take the children to school, “they no longer came home to eat, they stayed in school”. Vanda Ferencikova’s job was to try to help them find new bearings.

“Mourning of an ideal of living together”

Another practitioner, Patrick Almeida, has dealt with other, very different cases, in the same premises. He saw five people in all, during two shifts. “It was people who lived in the building,” he explains to 20 minutes. For these inhabitants, the murder of little Lola aroused “misunderstanding and anger”, and generated “fear of a disorder in the world, and a feeling of insecurity”.

The psychologist remembers two cases in particular. A lady “in her thirties”, “came in tears”, who could no longer sleep after what happened. “He was a person who was already in a professional and social integration problem, and this event added a layer to his social phobia”, recalls Patrick Almeida. And an “Algerian gentleman” or of Algerian origin, who was “in tears in a kind of mixture of sadness for the girl’s parents and fear for him”, with the “fear of being stigmatized because of his origin”, the suspect of Lola’s murder, Dhabia B., being born in Algeria. “He could no longer sleep, his anxiety for the future was on a loop, he feared being punished because the suspect is also Algerian. He was very bad, ”recalls the psychologist.

Finally, many of these people had to manage according to the psychologist a form of “mourning for an ideal of life together, of life in community”, and were able to share their sadness and their melancholy. “It was important that this cell be set up, especially since it was not people who are used to consulting”, abounds his colleague Vanda Ferencikova. And to conclude: “It allowed them to put words to what they felt, to think things through, faced with something terrible and meaningless. »

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