The mother arrested Tuesday evening near Nancy admitted in police custody to having killed her two young children, aged 9 months and two and a half years, said Wednesday the public prosecutor, François Pérain. She will be presented to an examining magistrate on Thursday “with a view to her indictment”, he added.
The suspect was arrested in Drouville (Meurthe-et-Moselle) by the gendarmerie on Tuesday evening and her state of health was “deemed compatible with police custody”, said the Nancy prosecutor’s office. The woman, aged around 35, later confessed to investigators “suffocating” her two children in her car.
The mother then wanted to “end her life”
She also said she bought beers, a roll of tape and garbage bags following killing her children. She wanted to “end her life”, a desire “corroborated by the presence of handwritten letters” in her car, in which she had written “wanting to end life”, according to François Pérain. Apparently psychologically fragile, she would have suffered from episodes of depression in the past and had relationship problems.
Before killing her children, she had first assaulted her husband on Tuesday morning with a hammer. Slightly injured, he was able to go to the hospital for treatment and then went to the gendarmerie to report the attack, but on his return to his home his wife was no longer there.
At the very beginning of the followingnoon, she had picked up her two children from the crèche where they were normally kept for the day. The gendarmes then set out to find her and tried to locate her, without success at first. It was only at the beginning of the evening that the mother of the family had returned home to look for a stuffed animal of her daughter, declaring to her husband that she had to be buried with it.
The gendarmes, who were watching the house, had then managed to catch up with the young woman and had discovered the bodies of her two children on the passenger seat, at the front of the car. A psychological unit has been set up for the gendarmes and firefighters who intervened in Drouville on Tuesday evening.
