“I just wish the driver would apologize”: at the appeal trial of the Millas bus accident, the victims had their say on Wednesday, after the defendant tirelessly denied any fault on Tuesday, in this tragedy which caused the death of six schoolchildren.
Four of the children present on the school bus this December 14, 2017 took the stand of the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal, to once again pull the thread of this journey which cost the lives of six of their comrades and injured seventeen people, eight of whom were serious, in the collision between their bus and a TER at a level crossing in Millas (Pyrénées-Orientales).
Alicia Poveda, 13 years old at the time of the events, comes forward: apple green jacket and black shorts which reveal the prosthesis she now has in place of her right leg, she stands straight and speaks in a voice clear.
Sitting in the front row on the bus that day, she claims to have seen the level crossing barrier lowered, which the driver, Nadine Oliveira, has denied since the start of the procedure.
“We hit the barriers, I turn my head and I see the headlights of the train getting closer”describes the now young woman, her voice trembling: “I realized that the train was going to hit us, I curled up into a ball and closed my eyes”.
She then remembers her “non-existent leg”the torn calf, and this moment when she faints.
If she has tried painfully to live since – she obtained the baccalaureate and is now a live-in nanny -, Alicia is mainly waiting for an apology: “Let us all be victims and her guilty, so that we can rebuild ourselves”.
“For me justice was done”
Enzo remembers the magic trick he was doing on a friend on the bus, before being surprised by the train horn, a noise that haunted him for four years. Her friend died instantly, her hand was crushed, an injury from which he still has after-effects.
Although he admits that he initially testified that the barriers were open, he now believes that he “idealized the situation”: “There was no way she did that.”he explains about Nadine Oliveira, the usual driver of this bus.
Alicia Poveda, one of the victims of the Millas bus accident in 2017, at the Aix-en-Provence courthouse on October 7, 2024 / MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP
But the empathy he may have felt for this woman in Marseille, during the trial at first instance, has today given way to anger, after she appealed her sentence to five years in prison. prison, four of which were suspended: “She destroyed lives, (…) an apology would be so much better”.
This feeling of empathy had also animated Inès, in sixth grade at the time of the accident. But this appeal trial “complicates things” for her, who felt that “justice was done” after the first instance judgment.
“I didn’t make a mistake”
In her black suit, Nadine Oliveira listens to the testimonies sitting in front of her counsel, crying in silence, sometimes blowing her nose. The tears became more intense when, questioned by the president of the court of appeal to react to the victims’ demands for apologies, she renewed her testimony: “I didn’t make a mistake, the barrier was open”.
His obstinacy provoked reactions of annoyance among the thirty civil parties present. Alicia and Enzo leave the room.
And when one of the lawyers for the civil parties, Me Raymond Escalé, asks Nadine Oliveira if, faced with the multitude of testimonies attesting that this barrier was indeed closed, she could hypothesize that her memory is deceiving her, she refuses. and burst into tears in his chair.
It was after this fit of tears that the defendant became unwell and was evacuated by the firefighters, pushing the president of the court to interrupt the trial at midday then to suspend it until Thursday morning, while An expert opinion determines the capacity or otherwise of Nadine Oliveira to attend the rest of the debates.