Amandine’s body, covered in lesions, was found in 2020 near Béziers in Hérault. The teenager only weighed 28 kilos, after having been her mother’s painkiller for five months according to the investigation.
From this Monday, January 20, 2025, a mother and her partner appear before the Montpellier Assize Court. They are accused of leaving Amandine, 13, to starve to death in a storage room for the last five months of her life. He is tried for “deprivation of food and care”, and faces thirty years of criminal imprisonment. She, for “acts of torture and barbarity resulting in death”, risks life imprisonment.
On August 6, 2020, firefighters and gendarmes from Pézenas intervened at the home of Sandrine Pissara, in Montblanc, near Béziers (Hérault). They discover a body covered in lesions, it is that of Amandine, a teenager who only weighs 28 kilos and is 1.55 m tall. The investigations, the autopsy and the hearings will confirm that the young girl died of a heart attack associated with septicemia, a consequence of “serious negligence” and her “cachectic state”. “When I saw her in the morgue, I had trouble recognizing her,” confided her father, Frédéric Florès. He evokes the image of “concentration camps” to describe his daughter’s face, her pale complexion. “His body looked like the victims, with skin and bones,” he continued.
Her mother calls her “capricious, rebellious and thief”
Throughout the investigation, the mother of little Amandine, Sandrine Pissara, maintained that she was not responsible for the death of her daughter. She explained to the police the day after her death that she had suffered from eating disorders since confinement and that the visible lesions on her body were the result of injuries she had inflicted on herself. She even describes a child as “capricious and rebellious, thief and selfish”. However, during the last months of her life, Amandine was locked in a room without light in which a camera had been installed to monitor her, say her brothers and sisters. The forensic doctor ultimately concluded that Amandine was “the victim of serious negligence on the part of her family environment”.
Indeed, her father-in-law – who lived with them – “in a relationship of total submission” specifies France Info, is also on trial. But that’s not all, three reports to child protection services were ignored, and did not result in the teenager being placed. In 2012 and then 2014, National Education issued a report, but educational assistance dismissed the case.A procedure for “violence against a minor by ascendant” was opened in 2014 after several worrying reports of suspicious injuries to Amandine, it was closed without further action.
Amandine, an “object to be destroyed”
Amandine was placed in a storage room for several months, in total darkness, no source of natural light was accessible. The room’s light switch was located outside of it. The video surveillance camera was connected to the tablet of Sandrine Pissara and Jean-Michel C, her father-in-law. She could be punished by writing lines in entire notebooks.
Her body was covered in bedsores when she died; experts believe she had been lying down for a long time due to extreme fatigue. Her mother poured out “her rage on those who resist her to dispossess him of his freedom, to abolish him as a subject”, having made Amandine “an object to be destroyed over which she has the right of life or death”. analyzes a psychiatrist in the columns of France Inter.
I want to “raise my daughter’s voice loudly”
For his part, Amandine’s father had not seen anything coming in 2020. Three weeks before his daughter’s death, he had even received a message from the mother – his ex-wife, Sandrine Pissara – telling him that “the holidays were going really well”, and that Amandine and the whole little family were in good health. Now divorced, he says he is completely devastated. “What I expect from justice is that they be punished commensurate with their cruelty and their actions because they deprived me and I will never be able to get my daughter back,” says Frédéric Florès.
The latter actually expects “not much and everything at the same time” from this trial. I want to “raise the voice of my city loudly, so that people can hear that her mother is a cruel woman” and that “the word guilty be pronounced with a sanction commensurate with the cruelty of her actions,” he continues. He also reveals the circumstances of the last exchange with his daughter, before the latter succumbed. Amandine had escaped her mother’s surveillance before finding her phone so she could talk to her father. “It was the last time he heard her say that she loved him and that she couldn’t wait to see him,” adds France Inter. The verdict of the trial is expected by Friday January 24, 2025 at the latest. .