It is a case described at trial as “worthy of a Coen brothers film”.
Amandine Soave, 34, was convicted on Thursday of trying to eliminate Jimmy C., her former spouse. The Seine-Saint-Denis Assize Court sentenced her to 18 years of criminal imprisonment.
“I ask forgiveness for all these lives wasted by my fault. I will live with this guilt all my life,” Amandine, a little woman with hair tied in a brown braid, said in tears in her last words at court on Thursday morning.
Ambush in Bondy forest
Back to the case. On August 26, 2017, Amandine Soave, who had enlisted a hired killer, ambushed in a dark alley in the forest of Bondy, on the pretext of a walk after a dinner at Courtepaille.
The accused hoped to pass off Jimmy’s assassination as a settling of accounts linked to drug trafficking, to the point of bringing their three-year-old son in a stroller on this bloody ride in order to deflect suspicion of her. But placed in custody, she ended up confessing the facts.
Murder ? “The work of the bathroom”
During her questioning, Amandine recounted having patiently saved up for this criminal project, mentioned within her family by the coded expression “work in the bathroom”. She had collected Christmas or birthday money and sold her car with the help of her father.
She had put aside 5,000 euros in total. Just enough to pay the requested deposit … but not the balance that should have been paid after the assassination. As the protagonists of the case were promptly arrested, the final bill was never presented.
“Are we allowed to smoke people like that ?!”
Wounded by a bullet in the thorax, Jimmy escaped this trap alive but paraplegic. He can now only move around in a wheelchair.
After reading the verdict, the victim let his anger explode in the lobby of the Bobigny court, considering the sentences too lenient.
“Is that justice ?! We are allowed to smoke people like that ?!” Jimmy said, pacing back and forth in a wheelchair in front of the closed courtroom doors. “I have more legs, I can no longer walk!”
Amandine’s father and brother also condemned
The criminal drift of this previously uneventful mother was worth six people to appear at her side since March 30 at the assizes, which, rare, a good part of her family, torn and destroyed by this affair.
The court thus sentenced his father to six years in prison for complicity in an attempted murder, his brother to five years suspended and his sister-in-law to three years suspended for abstaining from preventing a crime.
The main intermediary, with whom Amandine had come into contact via Snapchat through a drunken friend at a barbecue party, was sentenced like her to 18 years old. The jury also ordered 15 years in prison for the shooter and five years suspended for the first intermediary.
Is caring for their child a motivation?
Amandine’s defense had argued verbal and physical violence on the part of Jimmy to explain this “extraordinary crime committed by an ordinary young woman”.
The Advocate General instead advanced the custody of their boy, the great absentee constantly mentioned at the hearing, as the main trigger of the fatal gear.
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