Death of mayor of signs: driver sentenced to one year in prison

The mason had mortally spilled the elected with his van after unloading illegal rubble into the Var.

Le Monde with AFP

The mason who mortally reversed with his van the mayor of signs, in the Var, in the summer of 2019, after having illegally dumped rubble in nature, was sentenced on Friday, March 18 to three years in prison, two of whom with reprieve. “You are guilty of the facts that are reproached for you, but it is an accident, an unintentional homicide with the aggravating circumstance that you had traces of astonishing product in the blood,” said the president of the Toulon Correctional Court in Addressing the 25-year-old mason.

The same sentence had been required by the prosecution of the young worker, who fled on Friday the journalists, traumatized by the media and political impact of this case.

On August 5, 2019, in the afternoon, after a day of work without lunch, it had been taken on the fact by the mayor, Jean-Mathieu Michel, 76, pouring, with an apprentice , loading its utility along a departmental.

A deadly reverse

At the bar, the mason, who has always said that it was the mayor, had explained to picked up the rubble as soon as he had been asked. Reassembled in the vehicle, he then started a reverse step to leave, ignorant, because of the absence of a rear window and central mirror, that someone was behind his vehicle.

In this maneuver, the mayor, then on the phone with the municipal police to proceed with verbalization, had fallen to the ground and had been mortally crushed. “I’m sorry what happened. It’s awful,” shyly expressed the mason during his trial on March 11th.

The death of “Jeannot”, Mayor since 1983 of this small Provencal village, had aroused the indignation of many elected officials. The President of the Republic had promised to watch “personally in the face of incivility and disintegration (…) of the meaning of the state and the nation, the answer is always firm”. This is “a failure, negligence, but not a voluntary, deliberate, even less [aggression] aggression because of his duties,” said the ministry in his indictment. public.

The lawyer of the mayor’s family, civil part, Jean-Claude Guidicelli, had, for his part, pointed the “selfish” behavior of the worker, who “tired”, “did not want to be verbalized And very want to leave, “driving him to perform this brutal reverse.

An allowance of 15,000 euros was granted to the son of Jean-Michel Mathieu for moral prejudice.

/Media reports.