A girl's body covered with bruises, bite marks and burns, fractured limbs and a shattered skull.
The list of the thirty-two lesions noted by the forensic scientist on the remains of little Hyana, 6, is nauseating.
It gives a glimpse of the appalling ordeal of this child martyr who died three years ago at the hospital in Tours (Indre-et-Loire) and whose protection authority, despite strong warning signals, was unable to prevent death.
In the box of the Assize Court of Cher, this Monday, two very young people will be seated: Hyana's mother, Noémie Poman, and her ex-companion, Hamza Boussalmi, aged 22 and 24 at the time of the facts.
The couple is accused of "acts of torture and barbarism on a fifteen-year-old minor by ascendant resulting in death", he as the author, she as an accomplice.
They face life imprisonment.
He also responds to violence against Hyana's little brother, placed six months before the latter's death.
Three members of his family, his mother, his brother and his sister, are on trial for "failure to assist a person in danger" and "failure to report ill-treatment".
Admitted to hospital in "catastrophic neurological condition"
On December 30, 2017, the emergency department of the hospital of Bourges (Cher) warned the police of the arrival of a 6-year-old girl in critical condition: "a catastrophic neurological condition" aggravated by "a delay in the recourse to care ”, will establish the autopsy.
The three women who dropped it off immediately left.
One gave a false identity, the other two (Hamza Boussalmi's sister and mother) claimed to have met her with the child in the street.
Little Hyana will not come out of a coma.
Transferred to the University Hospital of Tours, she died on January 16, 2018. Her mother, Noémie Poman, identified as the unknown from the hospital, and her stepfather Hamza Boussalmi, who fled, were meanwhile arrested in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne).
Mother and stepfather accuse each other
During the investigation, Noémie Poman and Hamza Boussalmi accused each other of violence against the child.
"It was Hamza who inflicted all this on Hyana," said the former, claiming to have been threatened when she tried to intervene, or describing herself reduced to "putting ice cubes on the bites" of her daughter.
“He said to me:
Shut up or I'll take it out on you.
"
“She doesn't recognize positive deeds because there haven't been any.
She remained passive, she did not know how to protect her child, in a relationship of obvious influence, ”defends her lawyer, Maître Delphine Debord-Guy, who recalls that the complicity ultimately retained by the investigating chamber does not had not been initially by the examining magistrates.
The lawyer describes Noémie Poman as "an extremely fragile young girl, who became a mother in adolescence, who has always lived under dependence: on her parents, social services and then on this boy who has returned several times in her life".
Hamza Boussalmi, he disputes the blows to Hyana, if not the last, that of the night of December 29 to 30.
He explains that he got angry and slapped her for playing with a tablet instead of going to bed.
The girl reportedly fell, banging her head on the ground, the shock leaving her unconscious.
"At the moment, I don't realize what I'm doing, it's stronger than me"
As for the violence before, he discards his co-accused, evoking "a gear [...] with slaps, blows, I'm talking about Noémie who hit her children" or on a previous companion.
He concedes that he sometimes hit the girl, but "not violently" and only bitten her "once or twice".
“At the moment, I don't realize what I'm doing, it's stronger than me,” said this man addicted to cannabis and vodka, already convicted of violence.
"The violence
(Editor's note: on Hyana)
begins before her arrival in this home, the role of the mother seems very vague," says his lawyer, Georges Parastatis, for whom "he cannot be the only one at fault".
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The peculiarity of this drama of abuse is that this family was known to the child protection services.
In mid-June 2017, after a doctor's report for multiple bruises, Hyana's little brother had been placed.
Seized by the public prosecutor's office of Bourges of a procedure of educational assistance for him and for his big sister, a judge of the children notes at the beginning of July that "it is not noted in [Hyana] of elements in favor of the violence suffered ".
The girl had been out of school
In early October 2017, after several disturbing reports and a hearing where Noémie Poman appears without her daughter, the magistrate this time ordered his placement.
But neither the police services nor those of the Child and Family Health Directorate (DESF) of the departmental council were able to carry out the measure.
Why?
At the material time, the public prosecutor had attributed this dysfunction to the evasive behavior of Noémie Poman: "We have a mother who did everything she could to [get] it out of it", had- he estimated, recalling in particular that the child had been out of school.
"Why did you place the brother and not his sister, left as a prey?"
Children's rights defense associations, for their part, blame a failure of child protection services.
Civil parties to the trial, they intend to bring this debate.
"Why did you place the brother and not his sister, left as a prey?"
Why didn't the police force open the door to execute the placement?
We do it for an eviction, not for a child!
», Indignant Martine Brousse, president of La Voix de l'Enfant.
“The police went in vain twice in ten days, then they sent three summons… before returning the case to the prosecution at the beginning of January.
Hyana was already hospitalized!
It's a shame!
», Laments Master Rodolphe Costantino, lawyer for Childhood and Sharing.
“After the affair of little Marina Sabatier twelve years ago, we said to ourselves:
Never again
, continues master Diane Massenet, lawyer for La Voix de l'Enfant.
But it has started again and is starting again!
If everything had been done as it should, if this placement measure had been carried out, this 6 year old girl could have been saved.
"
