10 years after an accident during a demonstration in Lyon, the lives of two Saint-Etienne women are still upset
It’s been 10 years, to the day, that two Stéphanoises were victims of a terrible accident. On October 6, 2011, Catherine and Valérie, employees of the mutualist clinic of St-Etienne, were seriously injured in a demonstration in Lyon, at the Cité Internationale. Following a charge from the CRS, they retreat and walk on a ventilation grid above the premises of the Convention Center. This gives way and the two women fall from 5 meters 60.
Catherine suffers from 22 fractures after the accident. Valérie, for her part, comes out with a head trauma and multiple fractures to the spine. She is now severely disabled and is in a wheelchair. “I’m so sick of it that I prefer to go somewhere else than to live”, she blurted out. Behind this terrible confession hides a great weariness in relation to this accident which pursues her, all the time, in her daily life : “With all the scanners I had to go through, all the papers I have to manage, it’s impossible for me to forget and move on.”
Two legal proceedings, before the administrative and correctional courts of Lyon, were launched after the accident. If the city of Lyon was found responsible for the accident, these procedures are not completed even ten years later. “It is a delay which is not admissible. This is explained, perhaps, by an under-equipment of our judicial apparatus. There are not enough magistrates in France. It cannot last, c ‘is a democratic scandal’, explains Master Thiebault, Catherine and Valérie’s ex-lawyer.