As soon as the first confinement was declared in France, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the girl told the school director: “I’m going to die. I’m not going to make it.” Mine turned out to be “monstrous”. You will be trapped until you die
Amandine was 13 when she died of cardiac arrest and septicemia in August 2020 at her family home in Montblanc, France. He weighed 28 kilos and was 1.55m tall. She had been locked for weeks in a windowless warehouse, where she was watched with cameras and deprived of food.
Since she was a child, “Amandine was assaulted, punched, kicked, beaten with a broom, had her hair ripped out”, described Attorney General Jean-Marie Beney, who accused her mother, Sandrine Pissara, a 54-year-old Portuguese-French woman, of torturing daughter for ten years and let her starve.
In 2020, after the French president decreed the first confinement due to the covid-19 pandemic, the child asked the school director for help. “I’m going to die, I’m not going to make it,” recalled the principal of the school Amadine attended, quoted by BFMTV.
“We suspected that she was being attacked, because once I touched her and she felt pain. I filed a complaint, she went to the infirmary, she had marks, we filed three complaints, but I don’t know what happened afterwards”, he added to journalists.
Initially, the mother explained to the authorities that her daughter suffered from eating disorders. According to Sandrine, that day Amandine only agreed to swallow a piece of sugar, some jam and a drink rich in proteins before starting to vomit and then stop breathing.
The investigating judge in charge of the case concluded in a report that there was “no doubt” that Amandine had been the victim of violence by her mother, “whose sole aim was to drag her into shameful and humiliating agony.”
At the trial, which began on Monday in Montpellier, Sandrine, a beautician and mother of eight children from three different relationships, ended up admitting to the crimes, describing herself as “a monstrous mother” and justifying her actions because her daughter “was similar to her father.”
As the hearings progressed, Amandine’s mother admitted to more and more acts of violence. On Tuesday, for the first time he admitted to “acts of torture or barbarism”. On Thursday he spoke in more detail about the mistreatment he inflicted: “Slaps, yes. Hair pulling also happened.” But he assured that the girl “would eat whatever she wanted”; despite weighing just 28 pounds at the time of his death.
The woman decided not to appeal the sentence to “avoid imposing on her children the emotional burden and pain of a new trial”, said Sandrine Pissarra’s lawyer, Jean-Marc Darrigade, speaking to journalists outside the Court of Hérault.
His partner at the time and Amandine’s stepfather, Jean-Michel Cross, aged 49, was also found guilty of having watched the girl’s violence and food deprivation for four years without taking action and will have to serve 20 years in prison – a more severe sentence than that requested by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
