“I really wanted to urinate and then pushed so hard that the child fell into the toilet bowl. The voice is sobbing. Wet eyes. This Thursday, before the Assize Court of Essonne, Leisami recounts this terrible morning of June 13, 2017. The young woman of 30, whose words are translated from Portuguese to French by an interpreter, returns to this lonely birth , at her home, in Viry-Châtillon. And on the dramatic gesture that followed. “I then knelt down and, I don’t know what took me, I put my hand on his nose so that he stopped breathing,” continues this Cap-Verdienne, who arrived in France in November 2016. J killed my son right away. “
In the accused’s box, baby face and long black hair, Leisami has appeared since the day before for the murder of his newborn baby. “I then took it out of the bowl,” she says. Then I wrapped it in a towel and put it against my chest. In shock, the thirty-something woman immediately called Mylène, a distant cousin who lived nearby. In the meantime, she puts the baby back in the bowl. And sit again on the edge of the toilet.
“He told me he was going to kill me”
“I didn’t want her to feel guilty and tell me that I had killed the baby,” explains the 30-year-old. I was so scared. I just told him that my son was born and that he was already dead. It was not until a few months later, one evening in December 2017, that she finally confessed to Nelson, her husband, with whom she had a baby girl in 2011, that it was she who killed the child. Put in examination and imprisoned since, Leisami also reveals to him, at this time, that he is not the father of the baby and that this one is the fruit of an extramarital relation. “Nelson had had doubts before, says this young woman, from a very modest family. And he had told me that if this child was not mine he would kill me, drive me out of his house and that I would not see my daughter again. Threats denied by the interested party, described moreover as fickle and seductive.
To better understand, you have to go back a few months earlier, in September 2016. Leisami, who must join her husband in France in November after 6 years of long-distance relationship, meets at that time a man, with whom she claims to have had only one sexual relationship. A few weeks later, Leisami discovers that she is pregnant. But aborting in a clinic is too expensive, so she goes “to a girl who gives her medicine”. “I bleed a lot and then something white came out,” she recalls. She said the baby was gone. “
“Denial of reality”
In December, a month after arriving in France, Leisami notices that she is pregnant again. But she is certain that, this time, the child is indeed her husband. However, doctors and midwives repeat to the couple several times that the term of pregnancy is scheduled for mid-June, which would mean that the child was conceived before she arrived in France . “I didn’t believe it,” repeats the accused. I was totally convinced that I was going to give birth in August. “
“We are not in denial of pregnancy, says a psychologist at the helm. But there is this denial of reality which persists to the end. Leisami wants to believe that this child is that of her husband. Hope that dies out during her lonely birth in June. “The child she gave birth to was one of stigma and shame,” deciphers a psychiatrist. The accused, she still does not explain this gesture, described by experts as “out of all rationality”. “I think about my son and daughter every day,” she says, tears in her eyes. I will never forgive myself. The verdict will be released this Friday.
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