New twist in the unexplained death of a principal of a college in Lisieux. Two people, a 17-year-old teenager and a 19-year-old adult, admitted to having entered the school by breaking a door, according to the Caen prosecutor.
Two individuals were apprehended following the suspicious death of the director of a college on August 11 in Lisieux, in the Calvados department. This information was revealed by the public prosecutor of Caen. The two people involved are a 17-year-old minor and a 19-year-old adult. According to the press release from prosecutor Joël Garrigue, they admitted to having entered the establishment by breaking a door. However, they claim to have left the premises before the arrival of Stéphane Vitel, the director. This version is supported by the analysis of telephone data from one of the individuals.
If the trail of cardiac arrest had been advanced at first, the disappearance of the official is now qualified as “suspicious death”. The Caen judicial police were seized. A judicial inquiry will soon be opened, as announced by Joël Garrigue. He also announced his intention to hold a press conference to provide more details on this matter. Stéphane Vitel’s autopsy “could neither exclude the intervention of a third party nor establish with certainty a natural cause of death” and additional analyzes were required, the prosecution announced at the start of the week.
What happened in Lisieux?
Authorities said no weapons were found at the scene. The chronology of events between the triggering of the alarm and the discovery of Stéphane Vitel, the principal of the Pierre-Simon de Laplace college, lying on the ground at 6:50 a.m. by his daughter, remains unknown. Stéphane Vitel, in the company of his family, went on vacation early Friday morning. However, he was alerted to the activation of the security alarm at the college where he worked. He therefore turned around to check the reason for this alarm. As he entered the establishment, his family was waiting for him in the car. After a while, they started worrying about his absence. “We thought it was long. My daughter was getting impatient, she went to see and she found him sprawled on the ground… I’m sure he was attacked, a blow to the head I believe”, testified Jeanne Mailhos Vitel, also explaining having seen a car “go with a bang” before entering the college. “There was light in a college window so there was an intrusion,” she continued. Emergency services were contacted around 7:00 a.m., but unfortunately they were unable to save Stéphane Vitel.