The collision between a TER train and a bus on a level crossing in Millas, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, on December 14, 2017, had caused the death of six children.
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Millas level crossing (Pyrénées-Orientales), December 14, 2017 at 4:07 pm. Regional express train 877 660, which then rolls at 77 km/h, strikes the full of school which crosses the way . The bus is cut in half, seats are found on the windshield in pieces of the locomotive. The accident caused the death of six children aged 11 to 13. The seventeen other students from Christian-Bourquin de Millas college present in the bus are injured, very seriously for eight of them.
“When I passed, the barrier was open. It is engraved in my memory.” Nadine Oliveira, the driver of the coach, does not bother and should camp on this position throughout her trial for “homicides and involuntary injuries “which opens, Monday, September 19, before the Marseille Criminal Court. A trial expected by more than one hundred and twenty civil parties.
At the end of four years of investigation, conducted at the “collective accidents” pole of the Marseille judicial court, a investigation fed by multiple expertise and a large number of testimonies, the investigating judges conclude that ” It is indeed the inattention and the imprudence of Nadine Oliveira who are at the origin of the accident “. Today aged 53, this woman would have locked up in a form of denial, and this can be understood on the psychological level, write the judges: “How to admit that one can be responsible for the death of six children and Of more or less serious injuries of seventeen other children, children who we know very well and that we used to convey daily? “
” Look, the bus pushes the barrier! “
Many elements of the investigation contribute to contradicting the position of the driver, who claims to have neither heard the ringing of the level crossing, nor seen the red flashing lights and then the barriers bend down. On the bus, among the fourteen college students – eyes riveted on their laptop, listening to music or chatting together – heard by investigators and judges, three say they saw the lifted barrier, only one the barrier lowered, two Dumb and eight others were unable to decide. In a summary table of all hearings (civil parties, victims and third parties), they are twenty-three to attest to an open level passage, six saw it closed, four say that the barriers were in the process of Back and twenty -one people are unable to decide or have no memory of the state of the level passage.
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