Three defendants, including one in pre-trial detention since Tuesday, were tried at the Béziers criminal court on Wednesday January 11. Two of them were accused of violence aggravated by two circumstances followed by incapacity for more than 8 days (45), committed on December 31, 2022, in Marseillan, on a 16-year-old minor. The third was tried for complicity.
The last day of 2022 was not the happiest for the 16-year-old Maseillanais. On December 31, a few hours before the transition to the year 2023, one of her neighbors went to her home, asking for an explanation about one of her shopping bags which was allegedly stolen. Feeling offended and wrongly accused, the minor returned to the charge a few minutes later with his 13-year-old sister, under the eyes of one of the seven children of the mother of the family.
“He started getting mad at my mother with a knife in his hand. Which he didn’t use, of course, but I was scared. Even if he’s a minor, look at his size! He has to do 30 to 40 kg heavier than me, even when I wanted to defend my mother I had no chance”, justified one of the defendants, aged 33, in the box. According to the victim’s testimony, the 33-year-old man came down to help his mother, tried for complicity, taser in hand, before beating her with a baseball bat.
Words refuted by the mother at the helm, and by some testimonies from neighbors who attended the scene, heard by the police. “I’ve never used a baseball bat. When I went to defend my mother, he gave me a huge punch in the shoulder blade. So I grabbed a stick that was lying on the ground, and the kicked my legs twice, before he managed to snatch it out of my hands and throw it away.”, explained the son, who claims to have called the gendarmerie three times following the altercation. The third individual on trial, friend of the plaintiff’s family and ex-companion of the mother at his side at the helm, justified his intervention in the brawl: “I arrived to separate them only. I didn’t hit or slap them, nothing at all. I just pushed them, maybe violently, but to make it stop”. A defense supported by a video filmed by the victim’s little sister, on which we see the Guadeloupean separating the two brawlers.
After two hours of hearing, the correctional court of Béziers found the three defendants guilty of the charges. The mother of the family received a two-month suspended prison sentence and her ex-companion, as well as her son, a 9-month probationary sentence for two years, without continued detention.
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