Trial in France: Mother on Trial for Killing Child During a Game Gone Wrong

2023-06-07 16:20:58

Trial in France

Judged for killing her child, a mother evokes a game that went wrong

Sarah C., 29, is accused of murdering her 5-year-old son, who died in October 2020 in Brest after being found unconscious.

PublishedJune 7, 2023, 6:20 PM

During the search, the police discovered four knives on the mother’s bedside table and two handwritten words on the refrigerator.

She assures that the child died during a “cushion game” that went wrong: the trial of Sarah C., tried for the murder of her five-year-old son in 2020, opened on Wednesday before the assize court in Finistère, France.

“cushion game”

“I never wanted to kill my son, ever. it was all for me”, assured the bar the accused of 29 years, brown hair attached, with difficult speech and staring. “Never, I could have hurt him,” she added, while acknowledging having been able to give him a few spankings and cold showers in the past.

It is 10:38 a.m. on October 20, 2020, in Brest, when Sarah C. calls the emergency services to inform them that her son, L., is no longer breathing. The firefighters are unable to revive the child, lying in pajamas on a bed, and whose temperature is abnormally low (less than 35°C). His death was recorded at 12:35 p.m. at Brest hospital. The mother, dazed but not crying, then explains that she played a usual “cushion game” with him, which consisted of leaning on a pillow placed on his head. Left in the kitchen when he was no longer moving, she would have realized, after the fact, that he was unconscious.

“Desperate Act”

“How can you kill a five-year-old child by suffocating him, without doing it on purpose?” Asks the Advocate General. “I don’t know,” mutters the accused, after a long silence. During the search, the police discovered four knives on the mother’s bedside table and two handwritten words on the refrigerator. “I can no longer face this life of nightmare, of anguish”, it was notably written there.

Evoking a “desperate act”, the young woman, who says she wanted to commit suicide the day before the events, also asked to rest “in the same grave as her son”. Depressed, holder of the RSA, the young woman was threatened with expulsion at the time of the facts. She was raising her son alone, who had not been recognized by his father. Her two-year-old daughter, whom she had with another man, was with her father when her brother died.

Perpetuity incurred

The latter had been the subject of several “worrying information” because of repeated absences from school, from which he had changed three times in two years. His teacher had once noticed a lump with blood on his forehead: the child had indicated that his mother had slammed his head against a door.

Frequenting an evangelical community and then a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses, declaring herself “very religious”, the accused herself experienced a “chaotic” childhood, made up of violence. Born to an alcoholic mother in a family of seven children, she was placed in foster care until she was 16, before joining a home, then becoming pregnant with her son at 19. His father refused to testify at trial. Sarah C. faces life imprisonment. The verdict is expected Friday.