Exasperated, penniless to buy food for his family, a man threatened to go shopping at the supermarket armed with a rifle. The gendarmes intervened, who first prevented him from committing nonsense, then paid the bill for him. It happened in Valfleury, a village of 700 inhabitants in the Loire region, in the center of France. And then it was the same gendarmes who had helped the man to post the story, enriched with photographs, on social media.
The gendarmes were called by a social worker who had long been in contact with the father of the family in economic conditions that the Coronavirus crisis made desperate. He had heard the man, who lives with his wife and 10-year-old son, persistently talk about his plan to go shopping at the supermarket with his rifle, not having a single euro anymore. Forty-eight years old, the man works as a street trader and the prohibitions of confinement to stem the epidemic have cut all his chances of working. By mid-March with no resources left, he tried to turn to banks. But, according to him, he did not obtain any postponement of payments - although provided for by government decrees for lower incomes - and he was only able to file applications. Arrived in a few days to exhaust all resources, until he can no longer buy food, the man threatened to take action.
The whole gendarmerie has mobilized, says the commander Christophe Sadler: "one of our social workers will take care of it from Monday. But since their refrigerator was empty, the 30 men and women of my units intervened and put together a food stock of emergency that they delivered to the family last night ".