A few days before the national holiday of July 14 and still under the shock of the recent riots, the news of the disappearance of a two and a half year old boy in the Alps has France in suspense once again. Little Émile left his grandparents’ house alone on Saturday afternoon, and this Monday he is still being searched for by hundreds of police, firefighters and volunteers.
The ruggedness of the area, with thick forests, rivers, and very tall vegetation, made tracking work especially difficult, involving dogs, a helicopter, and drones equipped with thermal cameras.
The boy was spending a few days with his grandparents at the family’s second residence in Le Haute-Vernet, a small town that belongs to the municipality of Le Vernet, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department, about 170 kilometers to the north. from Marseille. The alpine town has just about 130 inhabitants.
The grandparents were preparing the car for a short afternoon excursion with Émile. The little boy was apparently in the garden of the house, a safe place. For unknown reasons, Émile left. Two witnesses claim to have seen him coming down the street. They did not pay attention to it or issue an alert because the place is so peaceful that the creatures, even the smallest ones, play and run around outside the houses without much adult supervision.
The call to the police came at 5:15 p.m. and since then the search has been unsuccessful. The Digne-les-Bains prosecutor’s office took up the case and posted a photo of the child, his physical description and a contact phone number on social networks. Émile is 90 centimeters tall, has blonde hair and brown eyes. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt and white shorts with a green inscription. He was wearing sneakers.
The investigators do not rule out or favor any hypothesis, including the criminal one, although, due to the circumstances that have emerged, there is no a priori indication that the child had been kidnapped or was a victim of violence. All the neighbors know each other. Prosecutor Rémy Avon confirmed this Monday afternoon, at a press conference, that they have not yet found any element of criminal action and, therefore, no suspect has been questioned.
The first 48 hours represent the critical period for these cases, since from then on it is considered that the chances of survival for a child of that age and in that environment plummet. The search was focused on a radius of five kilometers, assuming that Émile could not go any further. The volunteers and the police, lined up four or five meters apart from each other, combed fields and woods. The police also thoroughly searched the houses, with the permission of the neighbours, to rule out the possibility that Émile had hidden in one of them or had suffered an accident. For now, the device provided for when there is suspicion of kidnapping or pedophile crime has not been activated. It is required, for this, that there is some indication of the crime.
Temperatures have been very high during the day in this part of the Alps, almost close to forty degrees, but they drop a lot at night. These are worrying factors because they reduce the chances of finding the child alive in the event of having suffered a fall and becoming trapped in the undergrowth. The prefect of the department, Marc Chappuis, indicated that, as of today, Tuesday, hairstyles will stop being carried out and “a more selective search” will proceed with specialized media. Chappins estimated that eight hundred people, including police officers, firefighters and volunteers, have participated in the search, and highlighted the “great solidarity” that is being experienced. Chappins has spoken with the boy’s family, which, in his own words, “is down.”
This region of the Alps was shaken, in March 2015, by the drama of the plane of the German company Germanwings that crashed very close to there. The aircraft’s co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had a suicidal outburst, locked himself in the cockpit when the pilot had left and hurled the Airbus A320, with 150 people on board, against the mountain. The plane had taken off from Barcelona and was heading to Düsseldorf.
Speaking to Le Parisien, the mayor of Le Vernet, François Balique, was very concerned. “It’s a race against time,” he said. Balique indicated that Émile’s family lives in Marseille but has been spending vacations in this village in the Alps for about twenty years and has never attracted attention for a particular problem. “Normally a child can’t go very far,” the mayor continued, skeptically. Even if he is from a hiking family and he can walk better than the average kid his age, he can’t have gone anywhere he couldn’t be found.” Balique alluded to the Germanwings accident. “It is a total drama for the people – he concluded -. In 2015 the Germanwings plane crashed. That pain passed and is part of the memory. These two days of searching for Émile have once again plunged us into tragedy”.
