“Everything we imagined is the result of prejudices when it affects certain neighborhoods”, says master Yann Herrera, lawyer for Lionel’s parents, dead under the bullets during a shooting in the Aubiers district, in Bordeaux, on Saturday January 2. After the arrest of five young people in the days that followed, four of them were remanded in custody and indicted in particular for “murder in an organized gang” Friday January 8.
“What is exposed to me by this family is that we really have a child who was like the others, with his pleasures: football, from time to time the console, his schooling in second”, explains the lawyer, while rumors of settling scores spread as a result of the shooting. “He had nothing more nothing less than a sadly mundane life to die from under bullets”, deplores the lawyer.
Parents “overwhelmed”
Maître Herrera, who already follows several other clients at Les Aubiers, explains that Lionel’s parents are “downcast”, but do not feel “no anger“. “At first, I felt people who didn’t seem to realize what was going on”, explains Yann Herrera. “Today, when I talk to them, I have the impression that there is a backlash, especially for the mother. The stepfather is there to face all this, it is he who has become my privileged interlocutor. “
According to master Herrera, Lionel’s parents remain for the moment remote from the current investigation. “The parents just want to meditate, recover their son’s body, and bury him. And then, of course, the culprits are tried and punished.”, he says. “This also poses other difficulties: the family is in Africa and we have a whole bunch of administrative circumstances which make it not easy to pray to a body in the midst of a criminal investigation”, continue Yann Herrera. “For parents, the reality around this death takes precedence over everything else.”
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