The day before, he had learned that he had entered the second year of medical school. News to be celebrated after a year considered particularly difficult. At the medical schools in Lille, as in other French universities, the winners take part in integration evenings organised by those who won this competition the year before.
This is how Simon Guermonprez, 19, was found on July 8, 2021, in the citadel of Lille, then in the apartment of a second-year student. Drunk, he left the party shortly after midnight. His body was found on the Lille-Brussels motorway in the early hours of July 9, run over by a truck. What happened between the moment he left the party, with his arm marked with eight bars in felt-tip pen, a way of indicating that he had consumed eight doses of alcohol, and this macabre discovery? The police officers who investigated this tragedy assume that the young man wanted to take a selfie on a bridge crossing the motorway, a few hundred metres from his house, that he dropped his phone and got out onto the motorway to retrieve it.
This tragedy is not the first following the integration evenings organised by medical students in Lille, as recalled in the report of the General Inspectorate of Education, Sport and Research (Igesr), seized after Simon’s death. He returns to “serious events” In 2012, a sexual assault occurred after which integration was officially banned by the faculty. “However, this continued to happen in full view of everyone”The document acknowledges. In 2015, during one of these evenings organised at a campsite, a student disappeared. He was found ten days later, drowned in a pond. In 2020 and 2021, two rapes were reported, followed by three serious injuries.
On Wednesday 4 September, the Lille Criminal Court was due to try three students – a young man and two women aged between 20 and 21 at the time of the incident – for hazing and inciting excessive alcohol consumption, for two of them, and for complicity in hazing of the student in whose home part of this evening took place. The truck driver, for his part, was dismissed for culpable homicide. The trial was postponed until 11 February 2025, at the request of all the lawyers, defence and civil party.
“Will of omertà”
Like his colleagues, the lawyer for Simon Guermonprez’s family, Mmy Damian Legrand “I received a copy of the procedure very late”. Above all, he finally discovered the contents of the inspection mission report, which ” born [lui] had never been communicated”while the mission “presented its conclusions in March 2022”. He will therefore ask that those responsible for the Faculty of Medicine also appear before the judges in Lille next February, not as mere witnesses, but to be tried there as well. “Simón’s father wants such a tragedy to never happen again. However, we have the feeling that the faculty is washing its hands of the incident because it does not happen on its premises.”trust M.my Legrand.
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