Toulouse: a robber sentenced to 10 years and victims who impress
To get money “for the tree”, a 26-year-old boy attacked a McDonald’s armed with a fake Kalashnikov on the eve of 2018. This trauma remains very much alive for the victims.
From the public benches of the Assize Court of Haute-Garonne, we can see his long blond hair and we can hear his emotion. The nurse was just 25 years old, was coming out of custody and had just gotten into her car when on December 23, 2018, she found herself with a machine gun barrel resting on her head. At the end of the gun, a gloved and hooded man screaming to accelerate. He will have just robbed € 1,300 at Mcdonald’s des Arènes, in Toulouse.
“With all my might, I resisted and fired the cannon at my leg. I am a nurse. I know with a bullet in the leg, with the Purpan hospital not far away, I have a chance to get out. In the head on the other hand… ”
The jurors, three women and three men, listen. Did they also observe Vincent Risse, 26 today? A boy mistreated by life “but all the children placed do not end up in front of the assize courts”, underlines the general counsel Céline Fleury in her indictment. In these ill-prepared armed robberies (fast food, the theft of a bicycle and the attempted theft of the car), in this trial of “bad choices”, denounced by the Advocate General, it is attitude of victims who command attention.
The nurse who fights for his life “but testifies without hatred or desire for revenge”, pleads his lawyer Me Morgan Dupoux who notes “his desire not to open his eyes to this appalling moment of violence”.
“When I saw that he was pointing the young woman, I went for it!”
And then the security guard. “Today he still hasn’t managed to get back to work. He remains monitored by a psychologist with regular medication, ”warns his lawyer, Me Marie-Ange Alexis. A man whose nervousness transpires during his testimony at the bar but who on the evening of the facts did not hesitate a minute. “I had stopped running behind him. He was gone. But when I saw that he was pointing the young woman, I went for it! He said. He pulled the robber, still armed, from the car and overpowered him despite the beatings. “You were afraid,” worries his lawyer. “Of course. But hey, I had to.”
In his box, Vincent Risse seems far from this reality. “You did not strike so you do not understand that a weapon, which only you knew was fake, can terrorize a hostage”, regrets Me Dupoux. The Advocate General who reproaches “the lack of responsibility for his acts”, requires 10 years of criminal imprisonment. To defend him, Me Jean Balbo evokes his bruised childhood and asked the jurors “to put an end to this violence which is that of his life”.
The Assize Court sentenced Vincent Risse to 10 years in prison, including one year suspended.