The builder of the building, the site manager and the representative of the control office were sentenced on Tuesday to suspended prison sentences. Justice has also condemned the five defendants to pay more than 2.6 million euros in compensation to the victims and their loved ones.
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Three months after the long trial which took place in Angers, justice spoke on Tuesday, May 31, on the responsibilities which led to the fall of a balcony on the evening of October 15, 2016 since the fourth floor of the Le Surcouf residence, in the heart of downtown Angers. An accident that had left four dead and fourteen injured, among the students who found themselves that evening for an evening that the guests and the residents described as quiet and without excess.
Faced with civil parties who had expressed their distress at length in February and March, the president of the criminal court took great care to recall in the preamble the principles of law which had guided this decision. This did not prevent the room from starting when Catherine Ménardais pronounced the release of two of the five defendants: the architect Frédéric Rolland (66 years old) and the works manager, Eric Morand (53).
Far, very far from the requisitions of the public prosecutor. In March, Eric Bouillard had claimed four years’ imprisonment, two of which were suspended, 50,000 euros fine and the final ban on exercising the profession of architect for the first and three years in prison including eighteen months suspended, 10,000 euros fine and the ban on exercising the profession of work driver for the second.
Only the builder of the building, Patrick Bonnel (72 years old), the site manager Jean-Marcel Moreau (63) and the representative of the control office, André de Douvan (84) were recognized as criminally responsible. The first is inflicted a three-year suspended sentence and a fine of 24,500 euros, the other two were sentenced to lighter sentences: eighteen months of suspended imprisonment and 1,000 euros fine.
additional expertise
To justify its decision, the court only retained the causes “precise and some directly in connection with the fall of the balcony”, namely: the bad positioning of steels leaving the facade and on which the balconies were fixed as well as the recovery of concreting not in accordance with the rules of the art and which favored the corrosion of said steel. The other causes mentioned during the trial were not deemed decisive: neither the change in constructive mode (the balconies had been cast on the spot instead of arriving prefabricated without the execution plan being reviewed), nor the quality concrete (diluted, porous and not properly vibrated), nor the absence of rejingot and water evacuation.
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