Monday, February 7, the mother, father and sister of the 8-year-old girl, killed in 2017, testified at the bar of the Grenoble Courtyard.
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How to say grief at a tribunal bar? How to describe the absence of a child and sister in front of a courtyard? How to talk about the pain at a jury? Jennifer Cleyet-Marrel, Maëlys’s mom, brought a photo album and prepared a kind of tribute to the memory of his daughter killed on August 27, 2017 in Pont-de-Beauvoisin (Isère). Joachim de Araujo, the dad, posed a painted portrait of Maëlys. And Colleen, the elder sister, read a text. On Monday, February 7, on the sixth day of the trial of Nordahl Lelandais, who appears in Grenoble for the murder of their daughter and sister, these threes three in the courtroom, appealed by this burden they wear with their words.
Jennifer, 42, has not flaldled. She was waiting for this moment. She tells her daughter who has not grown up and who would have been 11 and a half years old today. “I will never know your first lover, the job you would have done – a farmer or firefighter …” More than four years later, she still does not want to have “able to protect it”. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re not in a nightmare and if we’re going to wake up one day,” she says. This morning of August 26, 2017, when the Araujo family left for Jennifer’s cousin’s wedding, everyone was happy. “We had prepared. We had gone to the hairdresser. We had all been beautiful,” she remembers.
A devastated father
Maëlys had chosen his dress. A white dress with shoulder straps. All the evening, she played, ran with the other children and, around 2:30, she came to her mother. “The last time I saw it,” says the latter. “We danced on the track,” she explains. At the time when in weddings the men fell their ties and unbuttoned the top of their white shirts, we see on a video Maëlys dancing in his father’s arms and his mother next door. It’s their last moment together. They will not see her again.
Just before, the 8-year-old girl had told him about a gentleman who showed her dogs. Then around 3 hours, she did not see the child anymore. Everyone started looking for it. Maëlys had disappeared. Jennifer immediately tried to find the man to dogs, but he only reappeared later, shortly after 3:30. When the kneaded motley asks if he saw his daughter, he replied “No, in a tone blaze,” she says.
In the Araujo family, no one, neither the mother nor the father, nor the sister, imagine a second second that Maës was able to leave alone with a stranger in a car, in the middle of the night. “He had been taught several times,” Insists Jennifer. In addition, on a captured video surveillance image while it is aboard the Audi A3, it is seen on the front passenger seat, without a seat belt, supported – almost curled up – against the door. “She never went up in front of a car,” says his mother, convinced at that moment Maëlys afraid.
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