The Marseille Criminal Court sentenced Nadine Oliveira to five years in prison on Friday November 18, including a farm. The crossing of a level passage with its school bus had led to a collision with a TER, causing the death of six children, in 2017, in the Pyrénées-Orientales.
By Luc Leroux (Marseille, correspondent)
“What we wanted to hear, we heard it is the word” guilty “. For us, the trial is finished and the drama of Millas is now in our heads, in our hearts.” C ‘is with a “great relief” that Stéphan Mathieu, the father of one of the six children killed in the accident of a school bus ripped by a TER, on December 14, 2017, on a level crossing in Millas (Pyrénées- Orientales), welcomed the conviction of Nadine Oliveira. Hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic, the driver of the coach was absent on Friday, November 18, before the Marseille criminal court for reading a judgment which condemns her for homicides and involuntary injuries to five years in prison, four of which were suspended.
The year of firm imprisonment will be purged at home under electronic surveillance, said the president of the court, Céline Ballerini. A firm year “to take into account the punitive dimension that this sentence must take, the damage generated and the need to recall that, if the facts are involuntary, resulting from a road accident, they are however extremely severity by their consequences “. The court cancels the driving licenses of the driver of coach with prohibition to iron them for a period of five years and definitively prohibits her any function in the field of transport.
“Disincolure”
This accident which caused the death of six college students, injured seventeen others, including eight very seriously, all aged 11 to 14, “has the origin of a serious fault but of inattention as well as a In the absence of recklessness, “said M Me ballerini. With the exception of three families present in Marseille, the civil parties and their lawyers were numerous in the hall of the Assize Court of the Pyrénées-Orientales in Perpignan, where the hearing was broadcast.
Excluding any dysfunction both in the primer pedal leading to the closure of the level passage and in the functioning of the barriers themselves, the court considers that Nadine Oliveira “obviously did not operate the basic visual checks which would have Held to see the closed barrier in front of it and the vehicle stopped on its left “, nor the light signals. To explain this inattention, the court evokes “a chain of circumstances that day”.
Operating this routine journey four times a day for several months, the driver of the coach had never seen the closed level passage and, this December 14, 2017, “her mind is probably mobilized on personal deadlines – a meeting You are in love with a work colleague – who divert her from visual and auditory acuity that will be lacking at that moment, “analyzes the court. Since the accident, Nadine Oliveira has always claimed that the barrier was lifted when she had embarked on the level crossing, despite many expertise that concluded the opposite. A position that at the end of the judgment, his lawyers still hampered by expressing the press to appeal.
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