Le Figaro Nice
Thierry Vimal, a Nice resident who lost one of his daughters in the attack of July 14, 2016, on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, was received on Tuesday by the director of the municipal police, Jérôme Marcenac. The latter apologized to him on behalf of the institution after the tasteless joke he was subjected to by an agent a few days earlier.
On April 3, while riding a motorcycle in the city, the father was arrested by the vast police force set up not far from the Massena high school, where his second daughter goes to school. Worried, he immediately inquired about the situation with a municipal police officer. Rather than reassuring him and immediately admitting to him that it was just an ordinary fire, the official made him believe that a bomb had exploded in the high school, then that a helicopter had crashed on it. Psychological torture for a man still traumatized by the death of one of his children in the National Day attack seven years earlier.
In an open letter addressed to the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, and published on social networks on Monday, Thierry Vimal, confided all his bitterness towards the attitude of the police officer, also denouncing a cruel lack of empathy.
“I don’t remember returning home on the motorbike. At home I decompensated, cried, urgently consulted my psychiatrist by video. I expect to suffer for a few weeks from resurgences of the 14th (July 2016, Editor's note), from thoughtlessness, confusion, memory lapses and drops in morale,”
he wrote at the time. And to ask ourselves:
“Did we deserve such treatment?”
Maturity and responsibility
In a new message published on Facebook Wednesday morning, the father said that he had been received
“courteously”
by the director of the Nice municipal police.
“Everyone agreed: this type of attitude has no place in the police
,” he reported after this exchange, specifying that he had accepted the apologies of Jérôme Marcenac,
“in the same collective state of mind
.
As for the agent in question, the latter
“spontaneously reported to his management”
as soon as an administrative investigation was opened on Monday.
“I see this as a mark of the maturity and responsibility that he lacked last Friday. He didn't deny anything, his version of the facts corresponds exactly to mine. He will be sanctioned
,” Thierry Vimal further clarified. Information confirmed by the municipality, which does not know more about the nature of this sanction at this stage.