Despite the responsiveness of the emergency services, the young girl succumbed to her injuries. The 13-year-old girl hospitalized in “absolute emergency” after the fire which killed two children on Saturday in a farmhouse in Selles (Eure), was first between life and death on Monday, the public prosecutor’s office had indicated. Evreux before confirming the death on Wednesday.
Extricated from the blaze in cardiorespiratory arrest on Saturday, she had been evacuated “in absolute urgency” by helicopter to the Trousseau hospital in Paris.
In total, five adults and five children, four generations of the same family reunited for Christmas, were in this second home near Pont-Audemer. The people present in the house on the night of the events came from Yvelines, Paris (16th century), Saône-et-Loire and Switzerland, said prosecutor Salort. The five adults, including a nonagenarian, and two other children from other siblings, were able to extricate themselves from the flames.
The grandfather gave the alert
“A legal expert has been seized. Forensic expertise operations are underway to determine the origin of the fire which remains at this undetermined time,” added the magistrate. The firefighters were alerted to the incident around 3:45 a.m. and arrived quickly on the scene, but the fire was already very advanced and the Norman farmhouse was engulfed in flames.
More than 80 firefighters, Samu teams and a dozen gendarmes from Pont-Audemer had been mobilized. An investigation “in search of the causes of death” was opened on Saturday. “We are on the assumption of an accident, there is no other element to think of anything else”, then declared to AFP Sandrine Ballanger, assistant prosecutor in Évreux.
“Firefighters arriving in the house detected a hot spot near a chimney. It is a raw element that requires confirmation, ”added the magistrate. Technical expertise will be carried out but will take time, she explained. According to the first elements of the investigation, it was the grandfather who discovered the fire and gave the alert.