For six hours one evening in September 2018 in Mulhouse, nine-year-old Seal-Evan was beaten for not having done his homework.
He died: his tortured big brother was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Friday by the Doubs Assize Court.
Dylan Owana Bodo, 26, had been on appeal since Wednesday for “intentional violence against a 15-year-old minor resulting in death without intention of causing it”.
The Doubs Assize Court followed the prosecution's requisitions and sentenced him to 12 years' imprisonment, a decision which left the young man impassive.
A six-hour ordeal, under the eyes of his other brother
Three figures symbolize this “file of the unspeakable, the unbearable”, had pleaded the lawyer of the civil party, Me Corinne Vuillemin: “Seal-Evan, nine years old, his ordeal lasted six hours, under the eyes of his 11-year-old brother.
The accused affirms that he “never wanted to kill his brother, but to harm him, yes, that he suffers, yes”, underlined the general advocate, Marie-Christine Tarrare.
She identified in this “particularly intense violence, committed over a long period of time”, the “source” of Seal-Evan’s death.
A broken broomstick
Dylan Owana Bodo, who himself grew up in Cameroon in a context of daily violence, admits to having beaten his brother on the orders of his mother, traveling to Paris, but he maintains that the blows did not kill the child.
“He did not deliver a fatal blow” and there is “a doubt, which must benefit him”, argued his lawyer, Me Fabien Ndoumou.
On September 16, 2018, Seal-Evan, a happy and enthusiastic boy, suffered a volley of slaps and belt blows in the family apartment in Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin), from his older brother and his sister.
The child resists and insults his brother who, imbued with voodoo beliefs, then thinks he is “possessed” and “sees red, very red”: the blows redouble, with a broom handle, hit so hard that he breaks on his Seal-Evan's body.
His other 11-year-old brother, to whom the boy is very close, and the partner of the eldest, who is pregnant, helplessly witness the events.
Dylan Owana Bodo “is taken aback by the resistance of his little brother, he no longer seeks to educate him, but to submit him,” psychiatrist Philippe Goetz analyzed before the jurors.
“He is incapable of being the authority figure he wants to be” and “the violence he suffered as a child is replayed here.
He no longer suffers the stick, it is he who holds it,” he continues.
“Seal-Evan also died because his mother didn’t protect him”
The correction session, partly recorded by the sister, lasts until midnight, when Seal-Evan becomes confused, loses consciousness and dies.
According to the autopsy, the causes of death are unclear.
The child would have been asphyxiated by the inhalation of the contents of his stomach during regurgitation, while feeling unwell.
“Seal-Evan also died because his mother did not protect him,” notes the public prosecutor, “this absent mother will order her eldest son to “manage” the youngest”
Me Ndoumou specifies that his client, who had recently arrived in Mulhouse and had a clean criminal record despite a chaotic journey, “had found disorganization in the house and was trying to put things in order”.
During their trial at first instance before the Haut-Rhin Assize Court, the older brother and the sister, aged 25, were respectively sentenced to 15 years and six years in prison.
The mother of these siblings left to her own devices was sentenced to four years in prison for “complicity in willful violence”.
Finally, the accused's ex-girlfriend received a three-year suspended prison sentence for “failure to prevent a crime”.