Standing in the box, the young man with a tie did not blink on Tuesday, April 12. Twenty-eight years of criminal imprisonment have just been pronounced against him by the Assize Court of Doubs. Nicolas Zepeda is found guilty of having murdered his ex-girlfriend, Narumi Kurosaki, in room 106 of the Colette university residence in Besançon, the night of December 4 to 5, 2016. A few meters from him, on the public benches , his father has the same frozen, absent face. Their eyes do not meet.
How not to think back to the words launched the day before in his argument by his lawyer, Me Jacqueline Laffont: “If he is guilty, his loneliness is terrifying. He didn’t tell anyone. » This man who is at the age of his sentence – he will be 28 on December 11 – is alone, desperately alone in the face of all the irreconcilable Nicolas Zepeda who compose him. The adored son, designated heir to his father’s professional success, the elder brother admired by his sisters, the polite, self-confident, well-mannered and believing boy, the best friend, the class leader, the elected president of his class , the nomadic and multilingual student, the seductive lover. But also the crushed son, the wounded man, the archaic, obsessive and jealous male, and the determined assassin of the young woman who had had the audacity to escape him.
Exceptional trial
He is alone, facing a 29-hour camera in nine square meters with the one he has just killed. Alone with a corpse, when the worried rival knocks on the door, and the slightest noise pierces the paper partitions of a university residence. Alone to clean up the scene of his crime and make this body disappear. Sole owner of the last moments of life and the mystery of Narumi Kurosaki’s death. A chemically pure feminicide, even if the word, usually so overused, was only mentioned twice during the hearing. Since then, Nicolas Zepeda has survived in denial.
In this other suffocating closed door that is the Assize Court, for nine days, he held out. He won’t confess. He won’t tell. To no one. By setting aside the life sentence requested by the Advocate General and by condemning him to twenty-eight years of criminal imprisonment, the court and the jurors dismissed the anger, the incomprehension, the exasperated amazement produced by each of his answers to the questions obvious questions posed to him.
And at the end of an exceptional trial, they condemned the author of an assassination, “the dominant male who considers that the loved one is part of his heritage”, as Advocate General Etienne Manteaux had described it, but they also heard the voice of his defence, Me Jacqueline Laffont, half-opening a door to darkness: Nicolas Zepeda is not only the unbearable accused who does not wanna not confess, he is also a survival man who does not may not.