On Monday, 12 October, a boy of fourteen came into the Collège Joseph Lakanal in Aubagne, a town just east of Marseille, carrying a guitar case. Inside it, officials say, was a hunting shotgun. By the end of the morning the school’s principal and one of its teachers had been shot in the legs, and police had detained the boy, as Al Jazeera reported from AFP, AP and Reuters wire copy.
A guitar case is about as ordinary as anything a child carries through a school door. It stands for a lesson, a rehearsal, an afternoon like any other. That is why the detail is so hard to put down.
The case
According to France 3, he had several 12-gauge cartridges with him as well as the gun. He was not an outsider. The prefect said he was a pupil in troisième, the final year of collège, at this same school, and that police did not know him for delinquency or radicalisation. The hour is reported differently. France 3 says he arrived shortly after 9 a.m., while the Associated Press and the local parents’ association put the shooting at about 10 a.m.
Two floors
In a statement, the Marseille public prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, set out the order of events. On the first floor the boy fired once or twice, hitting the principal and a teacher in the legs. Aubagne’s mayor, Jean-Pierre Squillari, said he “fired twice in a corridor toward the principal and a teacher.” Then the boy went up to the second floor and fired twice more.
The AP’s account of the prosecutor’s statement adds what happened upstairs. One shot hit the floor in front of a teacher. The other went into a classroom and struck the board. Nobody on the second floor was hit, but Bessone said the people in that room were “very shocked.” The AP gave the wounded teacher’s age as 37. Both victims were taken to hospital, and neither one’s life is in danger.
Children ran for cover. In interviews with ICI Provence, pupils talked about the panic and how they got out. Some of them described signs suggesting the attack had been planned. The station ran their accounts under four words in French: “On se dit qu’on va mourir.” You tell yourself you are going to die.
The stairwell
It ended on the stairs. As the boy came back down, a member of staff stopped him, held him and took the gun. Police arrived after that and arrested him. The Marseille deputy prosecutor, Audrey Jouaneton, praised the staff member’s “extreme courage.” President Emmanuel Macron, speaking from Paris, praised the composure and “exemplary response” of the teaching staff.
A reflection, not a finding: states spend heavily on gates, protocols and drills, and on days like this the protection often comes down to one adult on a staircase deciding not to step aside. That adult has not been named.
What is not yet known
Prosecutors have opened an investigation for tentative d’assassinat, attempted murder with premeditation. The boy is in police custody. France 3 reports that his parents are being held too. A police source told the channel that the teenager describes himself as having been “harassed” at the school where he opened fire. Investigators have not yet established a motive, and that claim has not been tested.
Gun violence in French schools is rare, and this shooting came at a strained moment for the country’s classrooms. For weeks pupils have blockaded schools and clashed with police over the budget, and the government has offered a consultation in reply. There was no immediate evidence connecting the protests to what happened in Aubagne, according to the AP. The two may have nothing to do with each other.
Christophe Merlino, who heads the FCPE parents’ federation in the Bouches-du-Rhône, said he was “stunned.” Before any of this could be explained, a principal and a teacher were already in hospital with leg wounds, a boy of fourteen was in a police cell, and his mother and father were being held in other rooms in the same system.