In front of the judges, Simón Mérida took care of his appearance. Clean-shaven, with a wide forehead under close-cropped brown hair, he wears a light blue shirt, the collar of which protrudes from a navy blue sweater. But this Monday, November 25, in the judicial court of Pontoise (Val-d’Oise), the accused does not demonstrate the same attention to the detail of his verb. Chain laconic responses. Over and over again he repeats the same formula. Then the president of the court gets angry: “After five years, if you just came to us and said, ‘Because he was my father,’ that might be a little short. »
The magistrate seeks to understand why, in the spring of 2019, Simón Meridda helped his father, Luciano, try to make a woman’s body disappear. Her name was Marie-Alice Dibon and she was 53 years old. A biotechnology consultant, she lived sometimes in the United States and sometimes in France. For about fifteen years she had been in a relationship with Luciano Meridda, a taxi driver. After several futile attempts, this time he decided to quit.
But on April 19, 2019, Luciano called Simón. On the phone, he told her that he had made a “shit”. He asked his son to meet him at his apartment in Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine). There, Simon Meridda claims to have discovered the inert body of Marie-Alice Dibon. According to the son, his father then assured him that he had killed her by suffocating her, after having administered a large dose of tranquilizer.
“It was a perverse relationship”
Although he remained silent for days, Simón Meridda was not prosecuted for failing to report a crime. The law provides for family immunity in this matter. But the son, 35, is being tried for everything that followed: in legal language, for “concealment of a corpse.” Why did you agree, on April 19, 2019, to help your father place the body in a trunk? Why, the next day, did he return to his father’s apartment, help carry a large travel bag in which the body had been carried into the parking lot, before putting it in the trunk of his Jaguar? Why did he do that when his father asked him to buy shovels at a hardware store? The initial idea was to bury the bag in a forest, but the car got stuck in the mud. Why then did he agree to throw the bag into the Oise? To all these questions, Simón Meridda responded first: “Because he was my father…”
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