That night of September 21, 2020, his life changed.
Before the Assize Court of Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), Adrien H., 23, with his shaved head revealing the deep scars left by the machete blows which could have been fatal to him, reports to the bar the little of memories he has of this terrible evening, where Alexandre Polak, 26 years old at the time of the events, and his girlfriend Cloé T., eleven years his junior, had prepared his “killing”, in his words .
While he is preparing to have sex with the young girl - a regular "sex date" he met a few months earlier on the Badoo application - his new companion Alexandre Polak, patient in the shadows of the living room, a machete in his hand. hand.
Fourteen blows were given to him, while he was naked and in a weak position.
He implored them to spare him, to no avail.
Adrien H. owes his salvation solely to his survival instinct.
In total, 1.50m of stitches all over the body, 35% permanent disability.
“When I saw the photos of the file, forgive me Adrien but it looked like minced steak,” confides Me Alexandre Bouthier, one of his lawyers.
“The trauma he experienced, we can compare it to a victim of an attack,” says the pathologist who examined him.
Attachment disorder
For two days, before the Meurthe-et-Moselle Assize Court, the personalities of Alexandre Polak and Cloé T. have been probed - even if the latter, who committed suicide at the Epinal remand center in May 2021, is largely absent from this trial.
Were they both “evil” incarnate or just disturbed teenagers, craving attention, who had the irrepressible need to exist?
He grew up in a rather united family, with a caring mother and a present father - even if the latter was in prison before his birth for trying to kill his first partner.
In primary school, little Alexandre mutilated himself, he stuttered and later developed attacks of tetany.
A reunion with his paternal half-sister when he was 17 made him proud and happy, but she suddenly cut ties with him.
“She abandoned me, it split me in two,” he said.
The teenager seems to have an attachment disorder: each romantic breakup is “an ordeal”, which can push him into depression or even, once, to a suicide attempt by hanging.
On the side, he developed a passion for cinema, having a predilection for the "horror" genre but he maintains that this is just because he considers "the bad guys to be the most worked characters" in the film.
Also read “I acted like an automaton”: at the Meurthe-et-Moselle assizes, the trial of a terrible ambush
A vocation also for mythomania, at least Polak sometimes “embellishes” his stories, in his own way, always to be the center of attention.
To some he confides that he was a sniper, even though he was rejected from the army;
to his trainers he pleads a stroke, to justify an absence from an exam, from which he recovers the next day... So much so, that the lawyers of the civil party seriously doubt the rapes that he denounces having suffered as a child by a neighbor of his grandmother where he spent his summers between 2000 and 2004. “Didn't you rather want to mirror Cloé, who then confided to you that she had been gang-raped by Adrien and his friends?
», asks Me Bouthier.
The investigation will demonstrate that this rape, which justified in their eyes the assassination of the young man, was - itself - completely imaginary.
“Already in my stomach, it was scratching me from the inside”
“With Cloé, since she was born it has always been very complicated,” explains her mother at the bar where she confides her dismay in the face of a child who “made the teachers cry”, “followed since the age of 6 by child psychiatrists » and “in perpetual conflict with the world.
» At 13, his alcoholic and depressed father tried to strangle him.
Perhaps Cloé would have liked more attention?
A heavy goods vehicle driver, his mother is rarely present, leaving the adolescence to its own devices.
She describes it as “unmanageable”, “secretive”, “mythomaniac”, and as far back as she can remember “already in my stomach, it was scratching me from the inside.
» During confinement, Cloé plunged towards “a darker side” and developed hypersexualization: “she went even further in taking risks”, offering herself to adult men via websites while she was still a minor .
It was during this period that she met Alexandre Polak, in August 2020, when she was 15 and he was 26. The mother discovered him at the beginning of September: “I had planned to move to the Vosges, I wanted to change my life, the move was planned for October.
I tried to make them understand that the right thing was to let Cloé grow up.
» Ten days later, “there was a knock on my door, it was the police.
Cloé was accused of attempted murder.
My world collapsed.
» To the investigators who come to search her room, she unpacks everything, without any emotion.
“It looked like she was on a museum tour with them,” her mother recalls.
For her, her daughter had “the desire to be recognized, in evil as in good, she found it much simpler to shine in evil.
» In detention, “the only thing that interested us was to know if we talked about her in the press”, she told the court.
“He will remember it all his life”
Was the teenager desperate for attention?
Or can the seed of evil germinate in some of us, making human nature evil from the start?
To the psychiatrist who examined her, before she ended her life, Cloé T. declared: “Killing Adrien in the end would have been too simple, he will remember it all his life.
» If facing the investigators, Alexandre Polak initially said he was “disappointed with the result”, having failed to put his sweetheart's plan into action, today in the box he showed a little discontent. emotion and regret in the face of Adrien H. An expert psychiatrist concluded that his judgment had been impaired at the time of the events, which he did not consider for Cloé T. “She was his attachment figure, he made what she wanted so as not to lose her.
Coupled with an existing personality disorder, the stressful situation makes him lose control of his actions,” he explained to the court.
Will this affect the quantum of his sentence?
During his testimony, Adrien H. declared that he expected from this trial that Alexandre Polak “would be punished”, calling to him through the glass box: “You will be able to reintegrate yourself if you have a little sense, I I will remain disabled all my life.
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