Drama in the Tarn. A woman lost her life on Monday June 26, 2023 after being shot twice in the abdomen by a 78-year-old pensioner. An investigation is underway.
[Mis à jour le 26 juin 2023 à 20h01] What happened in the historic center of Lavaur this Monday, June 26, 2023 in the morning? At the stroke of 8:40 a.m., rue Carlipa, a 58-year-old former nurse was hit twice in the abdomen. The victim has since succumbed to his injuries, while his vital prognosis was engaged and he had been taken care of in Toulouse a few hours earlier. In a press release, the mayor of the city, Bernard Carayon, returned to the circumstances of the tragedy. “A man shot twice and at point-blank range at a person who came to help him before he went to have cataract surgery,” he said.
The septuagenarian was quickly arrested by the police. As several witnesses told The Dispatch, a first municipal police officer would have arrived on the spot and would have asked the madman to put his “rifle” on the ground. To which the main interested party would then have replied: “It’s not a rifle, it’s a 12 gauge.” While the man refused to comply, “a second municipal policeman walked around the block” and “gently approached the old man from behind, without making a sound and he surrounded him” , told the daily a witness of the scene. The Dispatch understands that the man allegedly shot the victim through the crack in the front door while the ex-nurse was on the doorstep. If, at this stage, the motivations of the septuagenarian remain to be clarified, West France indicates that the man was taken into custody for “murder”. The investigation, entrusted to the research brigade of the Gaillac gendarmerie company, is continuing.
What we know about the man suspected of having shot the ex-nurse in the Tarn
Aged 78, Marcel P. was taken into custody on Monday June 26. According to testimonies collected by The Dispatch, the man is described as “discreet” and “little talkative”. Born in Lavaur, he spent his whole life there. During his career, he was foreman at the Arçonnerie Française in Saint Sulpice. On the side of his private life, Marcel P. is described as a “hardened bachelor”. If he has, it seems, always had few exchanges with his neighbours, Marcel P. is a great collector of coins and stamps in particular.
However, the man having suffered a stroke at the start of the year, he had become rarer in the collectors’ clubs he had loved so much so far. “We hadn’t seen him at meetings for a few months. He had lost a large part of his sight and that made him complain a lot”, confided a member of the philatelic club of Lavaur to The Dispatch. Increasingly withdrawn into himself, handicapped by his vision loss, the man had to undergo cataract surgery. Could the fear of this surgery have made him lose his mind? This is what the investigators will try to understand.