Decognized by eight fire departures without serious consequences, Lionel B. was sentenced to three years in prison, including a firm year. He will carry out his sentence under electronic bracelet.
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Thirty-four pyromans were arrested this summer, according to the latest figure of the Ministry of the Interior. Here is one of them who presents himself – free – at the helm of the Dijon Criminal Court, Wednesday August 31: Lionel B., a little round man of 42 years old, shaved skull, thin glasses, loose t -shirt, pants trellis, sneakers.
Lionel B. has always been fascinated by firefighters but he is “afraid of blood”, so he could not become so. He is an order preparer and works an hour from his home, his brother takes him every day because his license was removed for driving in a state of drunkenness. He earns the only salary of the home, 1,500 euros per month, who must feed his wife and their three young children. This is why justice did not put it into pre-trial detention.
At the same time in 2021, Lionel B. made a suicide attempt. The firefighters came to his rescue. He had entrusted them, it was in their intervention report, that he was going badly, and that when he was bad, he wanted to set fire to the vegetation. “I am still suicidal,” he whispered Wednesday, in one of his rare intelligible declarations at the helm.
“I was well alcoholic, that’s”
This summer, the canton of Precy-sous-Thil, where he lives, 50 km from Dijon, has embraced. It took five minutes to the president of the court to list all the starts of fire accused of the defendant: nineteen in six weeks, within a radius of 10 km. Hay boots, wooden heaps, brush on the side of the roads, a barn, a lot of fields, including one on the edge of a wood. Almost all of these fires could be turned off before turning to disaster.
The gendarmes hunt was effective. The night of July 24 to 25, when six fire starts were reported, they wanted to control a parked vehicle not far from a fire. The driver fled. Too late: his license plate was noted, a hooked place on his vehicle, which was going to demonstrate the presence of Lionel B. on the scene of two new fires, on July 29 and August 2, day of his arrest in blatant offense. In his car, the gendarmes found a bottle of one liter of fire liquid and eleven lighters.
“These are serious facts, says the president of the court.
– Yes, I know, answers the defendant, peeaud.
– Do you recognize the fire starts that are reproached for you?
– There are some that I remember, there are some that I don’t remember. “
In police custody, he had recognized the nineteen. At the hearing, he only recognizes three, or eight, gets down a little, then cracks. His voice leaves in the treble. “I am really bored at the moment, I work, I try to feed all my family, it’s still five people. I can’t do it!” His file mentions big financial difficulties, 23,000 euros in debts . “You believe that by set fire, will it improve your situation sir?”
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