Mort d'Émile : "C'est un choc d'être passés à côté"… Comment la gendarmerie a accumulé malchance et loupés
Both paths. It is around 5 pm, this Saturday, July 8. Emile, awake from his nap and shod, leaves alone the house of his grandparents and performs the 50 m to the village fountain, next to a rabbit hutch. «He would then have left the Haut-Vernet by the GR 69,» says the mayor of Vernet, François Balique. For about twenty minutes, the boy advances on this wide path taken by the 4 4 until a crow’s foot. «In this section, nobody can see it, except for the walkers, but there was nobody,» regrets the mayor.
At the first crossroads, Émile has the choice: continue straight until the ford of the torrent des Auches, or turn right on a path on the mountainside. One thing is certain: his skull and his clothes were found below these two possible routes, when these two tracks become parallel, on each side of the torrent, just before joining the departmental 900. “We do not yet know exactly where he went, the whole area is very raving because of the recent heavy rains,” says a constable. We will have to wait for the results of the current modelling.”
UNANSWERED QUESTION
Reading the IGN map and its contour lines, the location of the discovery seems, after the fact, sadly «obvious». Émile would have left the village by one of these two roads accessible by car and would have gone down until falling on the torrent of Auches or one of its small tributaries.
Worst case scenario for what comes next. First because the boy, helped by the slope, will cross a greater distance than his pursuers imagine. Then because «if he fell into the stream or a water hole, he could drown and therefore cool down very quickly», believes General François Daoust, former boss of the judicial pole of the gendarmerie.
In case of drowning, no screams. Less odors. And the body cooling in water, very quickly more heat "signal" to the thermal camera. Clearly, in the midst of dense vegetation in this summer month, the worst conditions for research.
IGN Map
THE SNAIL TECHNIQUE
That evening, in one hour, about forty gendarmes and a helicopter were on site. Nothing at the thermal camera. The camera broadcasts a message from Émile’s mother asking her son to show himself. “The rule in this kind of operation is the snail technique, we start with the closest and we move away,” says Daoust. When I was conducting research, I always immediately sent pairs to inspect water points and the steepest areas.”
Has this been done? Have teams left to follow the Auches stream from the GR 69 ford to the 900 departmental? “People from the village went to the crow’s foot, that’s for sure, then most likely to the ford,” recalls the mayor, “but we didn’t think he could have gone that far. I was convinced that he had gone to the hut and the precipices behind it.” And then, the first tracking dog on site, this July 8, does not mark the direction of the GR 69…
(This is an excerpt from the article published on 09/04/24 traduction Reverso )
