Five years’ imprisonment, four of which were suspended, were requested this Wednesday against Nadine O., 53, the driver of the bus that collided with a train in Millas (Pyrénées-Orientales) in 2017. Six college students who were returning home on board of this bus were killed on December 14, 2017 and 17 were injured, eight of them very seriously.
Prosecutor Michel Sastre dismissed the “fatality” in this accident, while emphasizing the “exceptional dimension of this tragedy”. He also requested the cancellation of the driving license (for tourism and passenger transport) of the driver and her prohibition to retake them for five years.
“Yes, we are satisfied, but we know very well that it will not lead to five years in prison”, reacted Stéphan Mathieu, the father of a child who died in the accident: “It would be fair and symbolic that at least three years in prison, I think. Afterwards with regard to the driving license, it is completely legitimate (…) a person cannot continue to do what he has done by having killed six children and injured 17 others seriously. So yes it is completely, yes, legitimate”.
“Children’s lives have been taken away, the physical and psychological health of children has been severely shaken, families destroyed”, underlined the prosecutor in his indictment, specifying that “perpetuity” had already been imposed on the victims.
A “lack of empathy” from the driver
Conceding that this trial was “difficult on all sides”, including for Ms. Oliveira, Michel Sastre nevertheless considered that the “lack of empathy” of the driver could have been hard for the victims.
The driver has been on trial since September 19 for homicides and unintentional injuries in Marseille, whose court has a specialized center on collective accidents.
But Nadine O., has been absent from the hearings since September 22 following her hospitalization. She had collapsed during an interrogation intended to know whether or not she had seen the barriers lowered at the level crossing where the accident occurred. The experts and certain witnesses, in particular a young girl sitting just behind her in the bus, maintain that she passed despite the lowered barriers, which she denies.
However, “we are not on an accident in which we could see a form of fatality”, he estimated at the beginning of his indictment, but a “simple fault”: “It undeniably emerges from the procedure that the accident could only have occurred as a direct result of the imprudence, the inattention” of the driver of the bus, insisted the magistrate at the beginning of his indictment, specifying that “no failure of order technique was observed”.
“I am here to lay before you the pain”
The drama had moved the whole of France, upset by the images of the gutted bus lying on the rails. Ophelia, 13, Teddy, 11, Diogo, 11, Yonas, 11, Loïc, 11 and Allan, 12, had lost their lives and others had been seriously injured.
“I am here to lay before you the pain” of a young girl who suffers from “indelible scars that will accompany her throughout her life”, reported Me Castello-Picard. His right leg amputated after the accident, he is a “victim already sentenced to life”, insisted the lawyer, recalling how for this one, “on December 14, 2017 at 4:07 p.m.”, his existence “brutally changed in horror”.
During the hearings, the lawyers, some on the verge of tears, spoke of the difficult reconstruction of the victims, these “miraculous”, like this boy who, during his convalescence, spent his time building hospitals with legos, clinics, prisons and courthouses: “The expression, according to his lawyer Me Olivier Redon, of a real thirst for justice”.