A boy lived completely alone between the ages of 9 and 11 in an apartment without electricity or gas, abandoned by his mother, in a town in the south of France. This week, the woman was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but she will serve only six of the sentence.
The case occurred in the town of Nersac, south of Angoulême (southwestern department of Carente), and according to the investigations of the gendarmes, the child – then a sixth grade student – was abandoned to his fate by his mother, a woman 36 – an eleven-year-old who had custody of him but lived with his partner about 5 kilometers away.
Prosecuted for abandonment of a minor and compromising his safety, the mother – who left her son in these abandoned conditions from 2020 to 2022 – was sentenced last Tuesday to eighteen months in prison, twelve of which are suspended and she will only have to serve six. with an electronic ankle monitor regime.
The mother denied the facts during the investigation, as she had done during the trial, but neighbors confirmed that the child lived alone in the apartment, where gendarmes found an empty refrigerator and no signs of an adult living there .
Although the woman occasionally visited the minor on a scooter to give him food, the boy actually lived alone and fed himself most of the time with biscuits, cans or tomatoes stolen from the nearby balcony.
“I made a small vegetable garden and the child came discreetly to take tomatoes to eat,” a neighbor told television channel TF1.
The apartment where he lived had no heating or electricity, and the boy had to wrap himself in thick blankets to face the winter months, which were particularly cold in that French region.
However, these terrible conditions did not stop him from going to school every day, where he achieved good results and the teachers did not realize what the situation was outside school hours.
“He was smiling, an excellent student, always clean, polite. No sign indicated that he had been abandoned,” confirmed Barbara Couturier, mayor of Nersac.
The boy spent the winters without heat or electricity, forced to bathe in cold water. Neighbors helped him with food, until one of them anonymously reported the situation to the French police.
Local press Charente Libre reported that the child was placed in a foster family last year and that he does not want to see his mother.
Source: Clarin
Mary Ortiz is a seasoned journalist with a passion for world events. As a writer for News Rebeat, she brings a fresh perspective to the latest global happenings and provides in-depth coverage that offers a deeper understanding of the world around us.