He left Nicoleta, a young Romanian, “dying and he doesn’t care”: a 23-year-old man was sentenced Tuesday in Nîmes to 20 years in prison for having “fiercely” killed the prostitute who dreamed of a better life in France. The sentence, in accordance with the requisitions, was accompanied by a safety period of 10 years.
“We cannot hear that because she was in this prostitution situation the facts would be less serious. The company protects the life of all its members in the same way ”, had underlined Tuesday the Advocate General Patrick Bottero during his requisitions against Anthony Riss, ex-painter in house.
This tall and thin man, described as “angry” and “impulsive”, was tried since Monday for having killed this young woman of 25 years from a poor region of Romania for a “sordid” motive, the doubling of the tariff of the past.
“The value of Nicoleta’s life … it was 150 euros”
“What is certain in this case is the intention to kill, five stab wounds in the region of the heart, the first is fatal”, recalled the Advocate General. The 25-year-old victim was beaten in Rodilhan (Gard) on the night of May 31 to June 1, 2018, “while she was turning her back on him” to escape the vehicle and, “as if everything that was not enough, to make sure to finish it it hits it “with the car, had continued Mr. Bottero, speaking” of relentlessness “.
“The mobile… it would be the doubling of the price, it is cold in the back because in the end the value of Nicoleta’s life for Mr. Riss was 150 euros. If that’s it, it’s sordid, ”he denounced. The Advocate General blasted the accused’s lack of awareness of “the consequences that this has for the victim and his family”.
No regrets
Throughout the trial, Anthony Riss spoke in an erased, sluggish voice, and expressed no regret, just acknowledging with lip service having stabbed the young woman in an “outburst” of anger. The defense pleaded extenuating circumstances, including the fact that he had never been convicted, that he confessed to the crime, that he has suffered from epilepsy since childhood and is particularly “immature”.
The young Romanian did not experience “a sweet death”, insisted the Advocate General. The accused “knows that she is seriously injured or even dying and he does not care!” “He added, recalling that Anthony Riss, if he has a clean criminal record, also has a” particularly worrying “profile.
“Not even a picture of her” alive
“Nicoleta’s life was complicated, difficult. We do not even have a photo of her except that of her lifeless body ”found in a ditch in a state of decomposition on June 3, regretted the Advocate General. Previously Me Pauline Garcia, the lawyer of Marian, the father of the victim, a poor farmer who could not come from Romania for the trial, had tried with great humanity to draw up in the Assize Court a portrait of Nicoleta, evoking in particular “the unwavering bonds” between this only daughter and her father.
Nicoleta, whose mother died in 2015, nurtured the hope of a “French dream” to try to help her parents financially. But, like other poor young girls from Eastern Europe, she quickly falls into prostitution and will even be “the victim of very serious violence” from members of a pimping network dismantled in 2016 in Nîmes.
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“The last time I had her on the phone, on May 1 or 2, it was her birthday and she told me that she was going to come to Romania: she was very happy, she knew that I was sick ”, testified his father contacted by AFP at his home in Lipovu. Marian hoped that French justice would condemn the murderer of her only daughter “so that he does not make other families suffer”.
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