Woman, Four Children Found Dead In Apartment As Police Arrest Husband

The public prosecutor stated that the bodies of a lady, a newborn, and three more children up to ten years old were discovered by French police who broke into an apartment on Christmas Day.

The younger children, both boys, had no knife wounds but looked as though they had drowned or suffocated; the mother and her two older children, both girls, had sustained several stab wounds.

The prosecutor added on Tuesday that a guy who was seen on CCTV leaving the apartment in Meaux in the Île-de-France area east of Paris is in police custody. The man is believed by local media to be the woman’s spouse and the father of the children.

Two charges, each carrying a life sentence if proven, have prompted the opening of a formal investigation: the “deliberate killing” of youngsters under the age of 15 and the “deliberate killing” of a partner.

Public prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier said at a press conference that when police burst into the apartment on Monday night after receiving a tip from a neighbor who was the mother’s close friend, they discovered a scene of “very great violence” with blood all over the place.

The neighbor claimed that after failing to get in touch with the 35-year-old Haitian woman on Sunday night, she had become worried. When she went to see if they were okay, she discovered that the window shutters were closed and that there was blood on and around the front door. She then called the police.

Bladier claimed to have seen the apartment, which was “full of the effects of ordinary family life,” soon after police made the find. He reported that “a very great number of knife wounds… to the front and back of their bodies as well as to their limbs” had been sustained by the mother and her two daughters.

The children, who were 10, 7, 4, and 9 months old, have not been given names, and Bladier stated that it would be unlawful to release any information that could lead to their identification.

He claimed that the 33-year-old suspect, a licensed plumber of French nationality, had psychiatric issues and despair based on medical records found in the apartment. He was taken into custody and interrogated in November 2019 following reports that he had stabbed the woman in the shoulder six weeks before the birth of their third child. The case was abandoned when she turned down assistance from victim support groups and declined to file charges.

According to Bladier, the woman told police in 2019 that she had been seeing her boyfriend for 14 years after meeting them at school when they were youngsters. This October, he said, they got married.

The murders follow statistics from the interior ministry that indicate one woman in France is murdered by her spouse or ex-partner on average every three days.

The Interior Ministry of France released its annual report in September, stating that out of 244,300 victims of domestic abuse in 2022—most of whom were women—118 were registered as victims of femicide, representing a 15% rise from 2021. With 146 casualties, 2019 had the highest number of women killed by current or past partners.