Mortal fire: a granddaughter derived for the murder of her grandfather

Assassination or help die? A young woman is tried on appeal on Monday in Bourg-en-Bresse for having killed her 95-year-old grandfather by set fire to her bed.

During her first trial, in October, Emilie G., 33, pleaded “the act of love”, saying that she had acted to shorten the suffering of the old man, whom she described as an “old fetus”.

Obviously convinced, the jurors of the Rhône Assize Court found him guilty but did not sentence her only five years in suspended prison sentence. The prosecution, which had requested 15 years in prison for this “cruel act”, appealed the verdict, returning the accused before the Ain Assizes.

In the meantime, the Parliament adopted a bill on a help on the help of dying and the end of life at first reading, a sensitive subject which should again flush in the debates.

The young woman, in a “dissociative state” “likely to alter her discernment” at the time of the facts according to a psychiatric expert, risks life imprisonment.

In August 2020, the nonagenarian was found dead burned and asphyxiated in his medical bed with one of his daughters, in Saint-Laurent-de-Mure (Rhône). Placed in police custody two months later, his granddaughter, who came to take care of it regularly, admits to having killed him.

“She is a posteriori aware that she should not have and not by this means, but during the facts, she no longer had the strength to do otherwise,” explains her advice, Maître Thibaud Claus. For years, the accused, suffering from depressive symptoms, attended the degradation of the state of health of the one who partly raised it and which she considered her father.

After a fall in 2015, his grandfather was placed in medical residence, where Emilie G. claims to have discovered her one day in a lamentable state of quasi-abandon. Shocked, she removes her elder, equipped with a urinary probe and diapers, the residence. The daughter and son -in -law of the old man recovered him at home, in a furnished room.

Difficult daily care for the parents of the young woman, who second them while managing the education of her children, her couple problems and her multiple failures in CAPES, the professor competition.

A month before the facts, Emilie G. finds her grandfather bathed in her excrement after a prolonged absence of her parents. She says it: he would have asked her to die, without her informing the rest of the family.

But the element that triggers the acting is the adultery of her spouse, which announces on August 23, 2020. The drop of too much for the young woman: she takes a bogus of petrol and goes to her parents to set fire to the sleeping old man, explaining in first instance that he did not want to “burn him” but simply suffocate him.

At the helm, the accused will have to come back to the choice of this sinister method: she explains that she has paid gasoline, without looking at too much, but the expertise concluded that a “meticulous deposit” of fuel on the mattress and the duvet.

She admitted to having threw a fiery leaf into the room before closing the door and running. According to the medical report, the grandfather, trapped, agonized for a few minutes and died of the inhalation of smoke and deep burns.

A “cruel and selfish act” according to the Advocate General Romain Ducrocq, who had during the first trial denounced a method “to exorcise his frustration, his multiple failures”. “Did her grandfather dead dignified?” He asked herself. For the relatives of the young woman, who made her “have just had the” courage “to take action.