This Tuesday, the Marseille Criminal Court sentenced a 20-year-old young man to a five-year suspended prison sentence for having injured, after a long chase throughout the Marseille city, a police officer, on 14 April 2021.
That day, while France is in the middle of a curfew, G. goes out to buy food aboard his mother's Twingo which he drives without a license in the twelfth arrondissement.
The young man is not at his first attempt, since he is summoned a few weeks later to justice for similar acts committed in August 2019.
Five police crews on his trail
His road crosses that evening that of the police who realize that the vehicle, whose license plate is unknown, crosses the orange traffic light and makes a skid turn.
The police decide to arrest the individual… who immediately engages in an impressive chase throughout Marseille.
“A particularly stormy arrest which took place in circumstances almost worthy of a western”, launches the lawyer for the civil party, Me Maéva Charron.
Five police crews follow the track of the vehicle, thinking to hold there an offender hiding drugs or a corpse.
But the young man flees for only one reason, much more banal.
“I was passing my license in a week, so I fled, he explains at the helm.
I didn't know, I didn't want that snowball effect.
»
Gunshots and madness
The "crazy race", as the president of the court describes it, only stops after about twenty minutes, rue de la Busserine, in the northern districts of Marseille, while the driver, who followed driving lesson, managed to get into a "mouse hole" between a concrete block and a pole, the exact size of the vehicle.
The car then hit a police officer, injured in the leg, who used his weapon twice, and seriously injured the front passenger.
It is only 600 m further that G. stops, seeing his friend on his left bleeding out.
The facts had initially been qualified as attempted murder of a person holding public authority, before being requalified as refusing to comply, intentional violence against a person holding public authority and driving without a license.
"I didn't want to kill anyone that day," says the young man at the helm, who has lived in prison for a year.
I just wanted to run away.
“My client has no criminal record, insists his lawyer, Me Mathilde Dumoulin.
He is fully integrated into society.
“If the public prosecutor had requested the sentence of four years in prison, the court went beyond by condemning the young man to the maximum penalty incurred.
A policeman shoots after a refusal to comply in the Hauts-de-Seine
His car breaks down in the middle of a chase with the police
Car chase
Western
Police officer
Marseilles
Paca