A 35-year-old father accused of causing the death of his 2-month-old daughter in 2018, by hitting and shaking her to stop her crying, was sentenced Friday in Angoulême to 12 years of criminal imprisonment by the court of 'Assises de la Charente.
The accused, Laurent Gravelat, was tried since Wednesday for "willful violence resulting in death without intention to give it" alongside his companion, prosecuted for the offense of "non-assistance to anyone in danger".
At the end of the trial, the public prosecutor had requested eighteen years' imprisonment against the father, and one year suspended prison sentence against his partner.
The latter was finally released.
"When she left home, she did not imagine that death was going to knock on her door," said the lawyer of the companion Bernadette Thibaud Descamps.
During the investigation and then at the hearing, the thirty-something admitted having slapped his infant twice while his wife was absent from their home in Angoulême to go to the doctor.
Their daughter had died on July 4, 2018. The autopsy had revealed fractures of the skull, hematomas, blood in the brain as well as in the eyes ... For the coroner, the clinical picture evoked the syndrome of the shaken baby, abuse that kills 200 children every year.
"I lost my footing, I saw red"
During the debates, the accused explained that he "saw red" when that day he was alone in front of his baby who "did not stop crying".
After putting her in his bed, he went downstairs to the building and then went up to see her.
“She kept crying, crying, crying.
That's where I lost my footing, I saw red, ”he said.
If the thirty-something recognized the slaps, he however challenged the shaking yet established by the lawyer in his report, taking refuge behind "a black veil".
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Described as "impulsive", he consumed about twenty joints a day and the couple lived in great precariousness.
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Her partner was being sued for not asking for help to protect her baby.
A few days earlier, she had noticed a bruise on her daughter's cheekbone.
Jurors ruled, however, that she lacked the intellectual and psychological capacities to protect her baby and released her.
