Store manager rescues girl from car - father threatens to file a complaint

It has been hot in France over the past couple of days - very hot.

Temperatures have climbed as high as 40 degrees Celsius in some parts of the country.

(from Wikipedia , author: Lykaestria)

Not only is it inadvisable to leave child alone in a car, it's also dangerous and neglectful.

Everyone surely knows that it's not only inadvisable to leave a child unattended in a car, it's also dangerous as the temperature inside can be life-threatening, even with the windows open.

Some parents though appear to "know better" as in the case of a German couple over the weekend in the town of Villeneuve-lès-Béziers in the south of France.

They left their three-year-old daughter alone in their vehicle in the car park of a supermarket while they went about shopping.

Other customers noticed her by herself in the four-wheel drive and informed the store's management who made three announcements (two in French and one in German) asking the owners of the vehicle to come to the information desk immediately.

There was no response.

In the meantime the store's deputy director, Vincent Touya, had gone out to the car park to see for himself what state the girl was in, and even though the car windows were open slightly, as he told the regional daily, Midi Libre, he had to take immediate action.

"She seemed to be all right but the car was in full sun and the outside temperature was already 30 degrees," he told the newspaper.

"I put in a call to the emergency services and they told me I had to get her out of the car at once," he continued.

"So I took a hammer and broke the window. She was bright red, sweating heavily and when I took her in my arms her hair was soaked as though she had just taken a shower."

He carried the girl into the store and gave her some water and food.

A happy ending and Touya a hero!

Well that's what you would think.

Somehow the parents weren't of the same opinion.



Il secourt un enfant, ses parents portent... par Europe1fr

They were eventually found and according to Touya didn't appear in the least concerned - quite the opposite.

"The mother just continued shopping and filling her trolley," he told Europe 1 radio.

"And the father looked at me as though I were guilty of something."

But it gets worse.

Far from admitting any negligence, the parents insisted that their daughter had been asleep in the car and they hadn't wanted to wake her.

"There wasn't a word of thanks from either of them and the father even said he would file a complaint against me because I had broken the window of his four-wheel drive," said Touya.

"Everyone else in the store was outraged."

French government's speed camera policy mess

The French government has got itself into a right pickle over its decision to remove road signs warning motorists they were entering an area monitored by speed cameras or radar.

The interior minister - the seemingly omnipresent Claude Guéant - announced earlier this month that the signs would be disappearing from French roads and motorways.

It was part of the government's reaction to the increase in the number of deaths in road accidents in April - a jump of almost 20 per cent over the same month last year.

There were grumblings within the governing Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a popular movement, UMP) from parliamentarians that they hadn't been consulted, and from organisations representing motorists such as 40 millions d'automobilistes which insisted that the signs had "an instructive role as they informed drivers they were entering a dangerous area and would certainly be fined if they didn't watch their speed."

But Guéant persisted. The signs would disappear, "The decision was final and there would be no going back."

He was supported up by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who perhaps seeing a simple chance to appeal to the electorate (not that he's in campaigning mode of course and after all who can turn round and say they're in favour of road deaths increasing?) insisted that he would not "allow a rise in the number of deaths caused by road accidents" and the measure was one he would "absolutely not give up on."

Even the prime minister François Fillon, usually so savvy in assessing the strength of public opinion, threw his hat into the ring to support the decision.

That favourite of French pastimes, "polemic" then went into overdrive with some members of the governing UMP arguing that they fully supported the government's decision while others were less than happy as the first signs were removed last week.

So unhappy in fact that a group of 73 of them wrote to Fillon to express the anger and frustration felt by "millions of electors".

Oh yes - France is in a pre-election year, both presidential and parliamentarian, just in case you hadn't realised).

"We share your ambition to treat road safety issues seriously but we're disappointed by the complete lack of consultation there has been," they wrote.

"In addition we believe that there are other more urgent measures that could be taken to improve road safety that wouldn't be so unpopular."

Did you see that? "Wouldn't be so unpopular."

Pre-election year remember.

Speed camera (from Wikipedia)

On Tuesday the government announced that it was stopping the process of doing away with road signs indicating speed radar.

Or rather it sort of made that announcement.

Or rather it didn't make that announcement at all.

You can judge for yourself from the somewhat confusing explanation Guéant gave viewers during an interview on France 2's prime time evening news.

"There's no change in policy," he insisted.

"Road safety remains a priority."

All right so far. But then it gets complicated.

"I confirm that the signs indicating the presence of a radar will be removed," he continued.

Right.

"They'll be replaced by signs indicating the speed at which a motorist is driving."

Hmm.

"But these new signs won't necessarily be in exactly the same place as the previous signs telling drivers they were entering an area monitored by radar."

Huh?

"There'll always be a new sign (indicating speed) at some distance near to where there's a fixed camera but there'll also be the same sign at points where there's no radar.

It'll be up to local authorities to decide where exactly they will be. "

Confused?

Apparently the very existence of those new signs, which only "sometimes" indicate the presence of a radar isn't backtracking of any sort.

But somehow the government has managed to ties itself into knots and come up with an inspired policy that was already in place - well more or less.

Duh!

The death of Jocelyn Quivrin and the rise of the "new monsters"

The omnipresent mobile 'phone complete with camera capability can capture moments that many, and not just those in the media spotlight, might wish to forget.

A quick "click" and the damage is done with videos and pictures making their way to a wider audience via the Net as everyone and anyone becomes a "photojournalist".

But sometimes there has to be a limit, as would hopefully appear to be the case in the recent death of the French actor, Jocelyn Quivrin.

Just over a week ago Quivrin was killed in a road accident as he apparently lost control of his car at the entrance to a tunnel on a motorway in a western suburb of Paris.

Quivrin, who most recently appeared in the French film LOL (Laughing out loud) alongside Sophie Marceau, was just 30 years old.

Initial media reports suggested that he had been driving his Ariel Atom, a high performance sports car, well in excess of the speed limit especially as the vehicle's speedometer had been blocked on impact at 230 kilometres per hour (143 mph).

Police however were more circumspect and their caution seemed to be warranted according to a report in the daily newspaper Le Parisien, which said that experts' analysis indicated that he had been travelling at 97 kilometres an hour before the accident happened.

But the exact circumstances around Quivrin's death remain unclear even though police have called for eye witnesses, and this is perhaps where the tale takes a more than slightly macabre turn with the presence of a mobile 'phone.

Because someone on the scene shortly after the accident occurred and before the emergency services arrived decided to use their 'phone to take some images of what had happened and then try to sell them to the highest bidder.

Thankfully though the French media didn't take the bait. In fact among those offered the film there was outright condemnation.

"Pure voyeurism," headlined the French news website, Le Post, which also informed readers that a deputy editor-in-chief of a weekly magazine had turned down the pictures saying they had "been taken minutes after the accident, but there's no question of our buying them and to be quite honest it's appalling."

And from Jean-Claude Elfassi, one of this country's most notorious paparazzi and therefore no stranger to controversy himself, came equally strong language and the description of such behaviour as that of 'the new monsters".

"This person is sadly like so many others," he wrote.

"He tried to negotiate (payment) for these pictures with my friend, Guillaume Clavières, the head of photography for Paris Match, a magazine that has published some of the biggest scoops of the century," he continued.

"But Guillaume didn't want to sell his soul to the devil, and I can understand that."

While the pictures haven't yet surfaced in the pages of a magazine, maybe it's only a matter of time before an editor somewhere decides that it's worth paying a euro or two in an effort to boost circulation figures.

Let's hope not.

French woman marries her dead fiancé

Yes you read the headline correctly.

Out of France this past weekend comes the touching if somewhat unusual story of Magali Jaskiewicz and Jonathan Goerge.

The couple were married on Saturday afternoon in the village of Dommary-Baroncourt in the départment of in north-eastern France.

Nothing extraordinary in that perhaps except that after Jaskiewicz said "I do" in front of the mayor, Jonathan Goerge didn't - or rather couldn't.

He died last November in a road accident two months before the pair were due to wed.

Such a so-called "posthumous marriage" might be rare but it does happen from time-to-time and there are a dozen-or-so such weddings in France every year.

French law allows them to take place only if one of the future couple dies after all the official formalities have been completed to an extent that show "unequivocally the intention of both to marry."

The final decision as whether to grant permission for a posthumous marriage is at the discretion of the French president, and after all the necessary documents had been filed earlier this year, Nicolas Sarkozy finally gave his accord in September.

"Magali's case to marry posthumously was a strong one," said the mayor, Christophe Caput, who oversaw the ceremony and had been instrumental in assembling all the information necessary to be sent to Paris for official approval.

"They had been living together for several years, had two children and the wedding had already been arranged and the dress bought."

Not surprisingly perhaps the weekend's ceremony wasn't exactly a festive occasion, least of all for the bride.

"I'm not really in the mood for celebrating," she said afterwards.

"We'll go and drink a coffee and then I'll thank everyone who has supported me," she added, saying that she would also be putting the wedding bouquet on the grave of her husband.

France – drunk, drugged and behind the wheel

Perhaps this short post should be tagged from the beginning as opinion. But surely nobody could disagree that what follows was from the moment the main protagonist turned the ignition key, a combination of a deadly cocktail and sheer stupidity.

More details have now been released about a tragic accident that occurred in Allouagne in northern France last weekend, which left a 38-year-old man critically injured and in a coma, and his three-year-old son dead.

It happened in the early evening as a young woman was driving back to her parents. According to eyewitnesses, the 20-year-old motorist appeared to lose control of her car and cut down the bicycle of the small boy - killing him on the spot - and then hit his father who was walking alongside him.

A heartbreaking incident under any circumstances, but it made the headlines here in France because the woman was not only drunk at the wheel of the car, but she also admitted later that she had been smoking cannabis the night before.

Tests by police afterwards revealed that she had a level of more than 2.17 grammes of alcohol per litre in her blood – the legal limit in France is 0.5 grammes per litre.

She too was injured in the accident and taken to a nearby hospital in serious condition. Investigators said she probably wasn’t wearing a seat belt at the time. The woman herself doesn’t even recall getting into her car.

But the full story of her complete and total irresponsibility doesn’t end there – as difficult as at it might be to believe.

When police were able to question her later in the week, the woman apparently also confessed to having been in the process of writing a text message at the moment of impact!

Her memory perhaps too short to remember getting behind the wheel of the car, but apparently sufficiently alert to retain exactly what she was doing immediately before she destroyed a life.

How could parents forget?

It's a question that has preoccupied many here in France over the past month, and sadly made the headlines far too often. It's also one to which it's difficult to provide an answer.

Over the past four weeks there have been three separate incidents of young children or babies - being left alone in locked cars. In two of the cases, the infants died, in the third a passerby was able to intervene, break a window and save the child from probable death.

Yannis

On July 15, two-and-a-half-year-old Yannis died in the town of Pont-de-Chéruy near Lyon. The 38-year-old father was reportedly supposed to drop his son off for the day with relatives while he went to work.

Arriving at the car park just a few metres from the pharmacy where he worked, he was the witness of a road traffic accident, and his attention was apparently distracted enough for him to be able to offer the licence number of a vehicle involved, but not to remember that his son was still in the back of his own car.

It was several hours later that a passerby noticed the child alone in the car, and immediately contacted the emergency services. But it was too late for Yannis, who died of dehydration.

The outside temperature that day had been 25 degrees centigrade. Experts estimated that inside the car it had been more than 45 degrees.

Zoé

Just a week later on July 22 in the town of Saint-Marcel in the departement of Saône-et-Loire, three-year-old Zoé suffered the same fate.

She died after being left alone in the vehicle at the company car park while her 38-year-old father went to work.

Every morning the father would drive his five-year-old son to the creche and then leave his daughter with a child minder.

For some reason on this particular day he forgot about Zoé.

When he returned to the car in mid afternoon he apparently still didn't realise that his daughter was in the back and drove to collect his five-year-old son from the creche. It was only when returning to the car with his son that the father realised Zoé was in the back, and he immediately drove to the emergency department. But it was already too late by then.

Third case

On Wednesday there was yet another case, but this time with a happier ending.

A two-and-a-half year old girl was left in a car on the car park of a supermarket in the town of Brézet, near Clermont-Ferrand, while her mother was doing some last-minute shopping.

She had apparently only been alone for about 20 minutes when a passerby noticed her, broke the window and alerted the emergency services. The child was dashed off to hospital for tests and her mother taken into custody and investigated for putting her daughter's life in danger. The temperature in the car was again estimated to be about 45 degrees centigrade.

A look at the wheels of French justice in each of these cases reveals some astonishing differences in the way and speed with which they have been handled by the authorities.

The father of Yannis is not being prosecuted for the moment, although the police insist that it doesn't mean the case is closed and charges could still be brought.

Zoé's father was immediately investigated for involuntary homicide, and the maximum penalty for that in France is three years imprisonment and a €45,000 fine.

It's bad enough reading or hearing reports in the media of animals left in cars, their owners thinking perhaps that leaving the windows open for just a little air would not present any danger.

But as any animal lover will know, and even those who don't own a pet would probably realise, the temperatures inside a vehicle can rise quickly, even when it's not high summer. And the outcome is inevitable.

That it could happen once to a child is surely the saddest of news. But on the back of previous reports, for it to happen three times in quick succession!

An explanation

One prominent paediatrician, Jean-Michel Muller, president of the Association of Paediatricians of Nice Côte d'Azur, has tried to come up with some sort of explanation as to how parents could forget. He is quoted in the French press as saying that such things could happen to anybody.

"If you ask those to whom this has happened, they know that children shouldn't be left alone in the car, but at that particular moment their minds are elsewhere, they have some other problem," he says.

"It's not intentional by any means. It's like knowing that you shouldn't leave a child alone at the side of a swimming pool but in spite of that it happens.

"When it comes to leaving a child in a car these people have obviously had difficulties, or are preoccupied by other things, had other things to do during several hours and at the last moment forget that there is a child still in the car."

Whether that would be a convincing argument in a court of law would only become apparent if charges in any of the cases were brought.

But still there remains the question for many people here in France as to how parents could forget?