It was his mother who announced the sad news on Monday. figure of fighting school bullying, Jonathan Destin died on Saturday “in his sleep” in Marquette-lez-Lille (Nord) at the age of 27. “It is with a broken heart that I announce this to you,” she wrote on Facebook.
The story of the young man had upset France. Harassed for six years at school and college, Jonathan had tried to end his life on February 8, 2011 by setting himself on fire before throwing himself into the Deûle. Aged 16 at the time, he survived but remained 72% burned. Plunged into an artificial coma for two and a half months, he had undergone around twenty operations.
To rebuild following this tragedy, Jonathan Destin had written a book in 2013, doomed to kill meadapted into a TV movie by TF1 in 2018. “It was a liberation and the way to express to my parents what I had never told them”, indicated the young man in 2018 in an interview with 20 Minutes.
Raising students’ awareness of school bullying
Jonathan Destin also multiplied interventions in schools to raise students’ awareness of bullying. The announcement of his death sparked a wave of reactions on social networks. “His courageous fight reminds us that we must never stop the fight once morest the different forms of harassment”, reacted on Twitter Sylvie Retailleau, Minister of Higher Education and Research.
“Jonathan, always eternally by your side”, for his part wrote the singer of Indochina, Nicola Sirkis, who had sponsored a campaign once morest school bullying and invited Jonathan to go on stage. The reasons for the death of the young man are currently unknown. The voice of the North specifies that an autopsy of the body must take place and that an investigation has been opened.