“The kids have fun with nothing, they pick up a dead rat in the gutter and they play Davy Crockett,” said Coluche in 1975 in his sketch I’m laughing. This is no longer the case today. To have fun, some young people do not hesitate to vandalize, destroy, or even burn. This is what a young adult and a minor are suspected of, to the detriment of the Restos du coeur de Wattrelos, in the North.
The two defendants will respond separately to the accusations of willful damage to which they are subject. The first, an adult, was placed in pre-trial detention pending his judgment which will take place on October 18 during an immediate appearance hearing. The second, a minor under judicial supervision, will appear at the beginning of November before the children’s judge. Either way, both will be confronted with overwhelming elements, starting with the video of the entire scene, captured by the warehouse’s surveillance cameras.
They look at the surveillance camera, smile and continue
According to the president of Restos de la métropole Lille, Thierry Sarrazin, almost all of the acts of vandalism were filmed. “At one point, on the video surveillance tape, you can see these kids looking at the camera, smiling, then continuing to break,” he recalls. It was again thanks to the video that he was able to see how the vandals’ wild spree unfolded. “They came the first time. They rang the bell to check that no one was there then came back later to commit the damage,” says Thierry Sarrazin. And there, the carnage lasted two hours.
Broken windshields and windows, torn dashboards, flat tires, fire extinguishers emptied into the trucks… As we have already written, twelve vehicles were thus damaged to a greater or lesser extent. “They were unable to enter the warehouse, which was closed. On the other hand, they entered another outbuilding and prepared computers to steal them, despite the alarm that had gone off,” continues the president. Only the arrival of an employee caused the suspects to flee.
On the Restos du coeur side, the bill has not been finalized. The figure of damage of 300,000 euros was initially put forward, but it needs to be qualified today. “We are waiting for the experts’ report to calculate the exact costs. What we already know is that only three of the twelve vehicles are covered for glass breakage for reasons of obsolescence,” laments Thierry Sarrazin. So, if the note will be salty, there is still good news: “One of the vehicles which suffered the most, considered wreckage, will be repaired free of charge by a mechanic in the region. This saves us the purchase of an equivalent vehicle.”