The defendant would have asked his known victim to apologize after a dispute before shooting him.
A 21-year-old man was charged with “murder” in Reims on Wednesday, November 2, and suspected of shooting and killing another young man he knew after a dispute in the city center last Thursday, prosecutors said With.
The victim, also 21, was discovered on October 27 around 10 p.m. on the forecourt of the Saint-Thomas church. Seriously injured in the temple, the young man died in hospital on Saturday, Reims prosecutor Matthieu Bourrette recalled in a press release.
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Excuse me
The investigation quickly made it possible “to implicate a single man,” says the public prosecutor. Born in Guadeloupe in 2001, the accused was arrested around 4pm on Monday when he was “walking with a mastiff on a leash and a knife in his belt”. In police custody, he admitted the facts of his first hearing, saying that “he initially had a good relationship” with the victim, but some time earlier “had been armed and verbally threatened by her,” Matthieu Bourette continued.
By his own account, he “managed to recover a pistol” and then went outside the church, pointing his gun at the victim “to obtain an apology”, but “to no avail”. He first turned and retraced his steps, then asked the victim to apologize “one last time” before shooting him.
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Before the investigators, the suspect showed “little empathy towards the victim”, specifies Matthieu Bourrette. He “repeatedly said he wouldn’t have acted like that” if she had apologized. The victim, who was born in Mayotte, had already been convicted of violent crimes.
The accused was sentenced on Wednesday in Reims to a four-month suspended prison sentence for traffic offences, but did not come to court. He “lived with his grandmother for a while”, but also declares himself homeless. Taken into custody, he faces a life sentence.
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