who is the “cannibal of the Pyrenees” and how did he manage to escape?
He is a neighbor who managed to avoid the worst. Last Wednesday, Jérémy Rimbaud, nicknamed “the cannibal of the Pyrenees”, tried to attack a woman in the center of Toulouse. “She kept saying ‘Why did he hit me?’, her face and head bloodied, a pool of blood around her,” says Nicolas Feuillères, who intervened with an unloaded gun. That day, he heard screams and saw a hooded man hitting his septuagenarian neighbor with a stick. The aggressor was none other than the patient interned in a psychiatric hospital who managed to escape.
The story of a chilling scene
The neighbor, still frozen by the scene, explains his intervention at the microphone of Europe 1: “I repeated (to the aggressor) not to speak, not to move, to stay on the ground. This is not what “he finally did. When he almost grabbed the barrel of my gun, he said to me, ‘Go ahead, shoot, finish me.’ That’s when I had to strike again to put him on the ground again”.
An investigation has been opened. The suspect was placed in solitary confinement, and had distorted the company of the team at the Gérard-Marchant psychiatric hospital in Toulouse on the day of the attack. A new act that revolts Jean Camy, another victim of the “cannibal of the Pyrenees”, who was beaten with an iron bar in 2013 before managing to escape, seriously injured in the shoulder. “I am very angry because I did not ask anyone and I find myself disabled,” he said on Europe 1.
“We shouldn’t see scenes like that again”, regrets a former victim
The male victim is marked for life by this attack. “Eight years later, it’s starting again. Without lying, I slept for an hour, and I’m on the alert. As soon as I hear a noise, I look. The cheek will never close, that’s clear. We shouldn’t see scenes like that again,” says Jean Camy. The farmer believes that his attacker, who suffers from a severe form of schizophrenia, should never have left the Cadillac establishment, in which he was first interned and where the patients considered the most dangerous are received.
Lack of resources in psychiatric services
How could such a dangerous man easily escape from a psychiatric facility? “I do not have the details of the case, but the services everywhere in France have a heavy load”, indicates Antoine Pelissolo, head of the psychiatry service at the Henri-Mondor hospital in Créteil, near Paris. “We have to treat the people we receive and provide some form of security for a minority of them. Most of the time, the services are secure to meet the needs, but there may have been a lack of surveillance at some point”, he explains at the microphone of Thierry Dagiral.
