Collapses on Rue d'Aubagne in Marseille: judgment expected this Monday

The court will deliver its verdict on Monday in the Rue d'Aubagne collapse trial, to determine whether one or more of the 16 defendants can be held responsible for the housing disaster that traumatized Marseille in 2018.

Who, among the deputy mayor, the expert, the trustee, or the co-owners, committed a possible criminal offense? By all accounts, the legal debate is extremely complex, and President Pascal Gand, who is scheduled to deliver his decision at 10:00 a.m., could take a significant amount of time to explain a decision that has been in the making for seven months.

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" The court has a great responsibility, but let it be certain that we, the families, believe in their work, we believe in their conscience, " Liliana Lalonde, mother of Julien Lalonde, who died at the age of 30 in this tragedy along with seven other tenants of 65 rue d'Aubagne, in the city center, told AFP. She hopes for " a strong message, namely punishments, convictions that can make them think and, above all, convince them that they can no longer continue (as before). Because in my eyes, they are all responsible, to varying degrees, but all responsible ."

The trial, which lasted a month and a half in the fall, was much more than just a legal case, and the " extraordinary trial room " had welcomed all the anger and sadness of the city. Throughout the hearings, tears flowed freely as the victims' stories of the bright and dented lives of their lives unfolded. Particularly at the mention of little El Amine, son of Ouloume Saïd Hassani, " left in the morning with his schoolbag and by evening, no more mother, no more clothes, nothing ." The proceedings established that the collapses of numbers 63 (empty) and 65 were inevitable given the state of the building. But no provision for shelter for the tenants of number 65 had been made, and the work undertaken had proven ineffective, even counterproductive.

The investigation had referred four people to court: Julien Ruas, deputy to the then LR mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, the architect Richard Carta, who had appraised the building less than three weeks before its collapse, and two legal entities, the property manager of number 65, the Liautard firm, and the social landlord who owned number 63, left in a state of ruin by Marseille Habitat. This was insufficient for some civil parties, who had summoned a dozen additional people, including co-owners, to appear.

In the end, 16 legal entities and individuals were tried for various offenses, including involuntary manslaughter through a manifestly deliberate violation of a security obligation, up to five years in prison, and subjecting vulnerable people, including at least one minor, to unfit accommodation conditions, up to ten years in prison.

Will the court convict the owners, who had not been prosecuted by the investigating judge? Prosecutor Michel Sastre agreed with the civil parties on this point, arguing that the co-owners were "well aware of the building's structural problems " but had " played for time " to " spend as little and as late as possible ." He even requested the heaviest sentence against Xavier Cachard, a regional elected official who, at the time of the events, held the dual role of owner and the trustee's lawyer, of five years in prison, three of which were suspended.

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Significant sentences had also been demanded against Richard Carta, the expert architect (three years in prison, two of which were suspended) and Julien Ruas (three years in prison), the only municipal councillor prosecuted in this case which had shed a harsh light on the inaction of Jean-Claude Gaudin's team, whose party would lose the town hall two years later to a left-wing, ecologist-civil society coalition.

During the proceedings, the defendants contested the charges as a whole, with their lawyers pleading for a series of acquittals. Julien Ruas, responsible for urban risk management prevention, said he refused to " assume all the responsibilities of Marseille City Hall ."

In Marseille, where substandard housing thrives on precariousness, these decisions matter. Since the tragedy, the justice system in France's second-largest city has no hesitation in sending slum landlords to prison, as in March, the owner of some thirty unsanitary studios in a former university residence.