It is through this abominable news item that we were able to give life back to this woman, discovered on February 13 dismembered in several places in the Buttes-Chaumont park (Paris 19th century). A first name has finally been put on this stranger: Assia; a face: that of a 46-year-old woman, brown hair, black eyes, mother of three children aged 8, 14 and 16.
And also the wife of Youcef M., placed in police custody on Thursday. Pushed to his last limits, the husband would have admitted to being the author of this atrocious murder and would have explained his gesture by “resentments that existed within their couple”.
This Friday, in the fifteen-storey tower which dominates the immense Beaumonts park, in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), these confessions are just beginning to be relayed by the press in the middle of the afternoon. The tenants also learn about it with the arrival of journalists who have come to collect their reactions.
The information picked them up cold and it seems unthinkable to them. On the 8th floor, a young mother pauses before cashing in: “I thought it was only in America that we did that! »
A discreet woman, almost invisible
It is all the more inconceivable for them that the residents of this building still struggle to remember Assia. Even on the floors closest to the 11th, where the couple lived. So much so that one would almost doubt the existence of the victim. In the neighborhood, no one has made the connection between “La Dame des Buttes-Chaumont”, as some call her, and their discreet neighbour.
Residents learn, surprised, that the victim and his alleged executioner lived below their home. “The husband took the odd elevator and we the even. That’s why we didn’t know each other,” says a woman upstairs. His son adds: “We saw him but he didn’t stay long”.
Here, it’s everyone’s home
Nothing very surprising in this HLM in the city of Paris, where the oldest rub shoulders with households with young children who have arrived more recently. “It moves so much,” slips Jacqueline, 87. She is one of the pioneers of the tower. She had moved in with her husband and children in the late 1960s into a spacious five-room apartment.
However, she barely knows her downstairs neighbor, a woman around her age. Now too old, she no longer leaves her home. In this building, we apply everyone at home: “We are not going to get into people’s lives”, adds another tenant.
On the 11th floor, the apartment’s dusky pink drapes have all been pulled back, adding a bit to the mystery that still shrouds this family’s life.