Death of Cédric Chouviat: the family requests the suspension of the police officers involved

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"J'étouffe", like Georges Floyd's "I Can't Breathe" in the United States, are the last words spoken by Cédric Chouviat, seven times according to sound recordings to which our colleagues from Mediapart and the newspaper The World had access. The delivery man died on January 3 following his arrest by four police officers who were taken into police custody last week.

Publicity

The end of the bottleneck, a clear standpoint from Emmanuel Macron and a conviction of the police officers involved in the death of Cédric Chouviat are the central demands of his family expressed on Tuesday, during a press conference.

Call for calm

Six months after the death of Cédric Chouviat, the various sound recordings that the investigators consulted trace the entire arrest which led to the deliveryman's death. After ten minutes of tense exchanges with the police officers, the audio extracts suggest "  J'étouffe  " pronounced seven times by the victim.

Her daughter Sofia spoke directly to the President of the Republic to explain that she did not understand why the police were still not suspended.

For Me Arié Alimi, "  what led to the death of Cédric Chouviat is an inexorable chain: blackmail at contempt provoked every time there is police control and which creates injuries, deaths in France  ”, according to him. The family's lawyers called for calm, and underlined the fast and efficient work of the examining magistrates to advance the investigation.

Police say they didn't hear "I 'm suffocating "

For their part, the lawyers for the police officers implicated in the death of Cédric Chouviat said on Tuesday that their customers had "  not heard the delivery man say seven times " I suffocate "", as revealed by a forensic expert.

These words "  were not heard by the four police officers,  " said Mr. Thibault de Montbrial and Mr. Laurent-Franck Liénard. They each defend two officials. To reconstruct the scene, the expert from the National Gendarmerie's Criminal Research Institute analyzed thirteen videos of this arrest, nine filmed by the delivery man himself, three recorded by one of the four police officers present at the time of the events and the last by a motorist.

"  If this " I choke " , said seven times, is audible, it is because it was recorded by the deliverer's headset, very close to his mouth,  " according to Me de Montbrial. The expert "  supports the hypothesis  " of this use of a headset by Cédric Chouviat, but without "  certifying it  ".

"  Mr. Chouviat was resisting his arrest, and it was in the struggle that he made his remarks, next to a traffic lane, the quays of the Seine, with surrounding noises and the sounds of the fight : the police didn't hear them,  ”insisted Thibault de Montbrial.

"  Terrible drama  "

When the IGPN investigators confronted them with this recording, on June 17 in police custody, "  the police were all surprised and devastated, because if they had heard these words, obviously they would have stopped fighting immediately  " , continued the lawyer, describing the death of Cédric Chouviat as "  appalling drama  ".

According to the expert opinion, "almost all" of the exchange between Cédric Chouviat and the police is however "understandable" in the three videos shot by one of these officials.

Judicial information is opened for "manslaughter". According to the first autopsy results communicated in January by the Paris public prosecutor's office, Cédric Chouviat died of asphyxiation "  with a fractured larynx  ".

The four police officers are summoned in early July by the investigating magistrate, who could then decide on possible indictments.

(With dispatches)

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