A naked, malnourished child in the fetal position on a pile of trash. This is the scene that gendarmes came upon while opening a van on Monday in Hagenbach, in Alsace. The 9-year-old boy had been confined there for more than a year. The Mulhouse prosecutor announced on Friday the indictment of the father of the child and his companion. We take stock of this sordid affair.
How was the child discovered?
Monday, a resident of Hagenbachde, a small town of 800 inhabitants 20 km southwest of Mulhousehears “child noises” coming from a van parked in a yard. She called the gendarmes who went to the scene and discovered the little boy “lying in the fetal position, naked, covered with a blanket on a mound of waste and near excrement”. “Due to the prolonged sitting position”, the child, “pale and clearly malnourished”, was no longer able to walk at the time he was discovered. He was immediately taken into care at Mulhouse hospital, said the prosecutor, Nicolas Heitz, in a press release.
What does the indicted father say?
The young boy told investigators that his father’s partner “no longer wanted him in the apartment and wanted him to be interned in a psychiatric hospital” and that his father had locked him in the van “so as not to intern him”, at the end of 2024 when he was 7 years old.
The 43-year-old father, who lived with his 37-year-old partner and two other children, their respective daughters aged 12 and 10, admitted to having confined and deprived the little boy of care. He was imprisoned. He claimed to have “put him in this van from November 2024 to protect him because his partner wanted to have him committed to a psychiatric ward”, reported the prosecutor, who specified that “no medical evidence” had supported possible psychiatric problems of the child. The victim’s sister, a little girl aged 12, explained “living with her father for 4 or 5 years, her mother having psychological difficulties”, according to the prosecutor’s press release.
How did the child hold up for a year?
The little boy had been educated in CP until 2023/2024 in Mulhouse and the school had “closed his file” when the family had indicated that he would be educated otherwise. He “disappeared overnight,” according to neighbors and witnesses interviewed by investigators. But several neighbors had heard noises coming from the family’s vehicle or home when she was away.
The father claimed he let his son go out with him until May 2025 and let him access the apartment in the summer of 2025, when the rest of the family was on vacation. He gave him a cell phone and told him when he could get out of the vehicle or when he had to leave the home. He had also installed a video surveillance camera facing the utility, which allowed investigators to see that he went “twice a day to the vehicle where he seemed to throw something inside”.
The child, whose last shower would be at the end of 2024, had a bundle of clothes and had to urinate in plastic bottles and do his business in trash bags.
Did the mother-in-law know?
The forty-year-old was indicted on charges of arrest, kidnapping, sequestration or arbitrary detention of minors under the age of 15 and deprivation of care or food compromising the health of a minor aged 15 by ascendant.
His partner, who is not the child’s mother, was indicted for failure to assist a child under the age of 15 in danger and failure to report mistreatment and placed under judicial supervision. She contested all of the charges against her. According to her partner, she suspected something but did not know that the boy was in the vehicle. The prosecution ordered the temporary placement of the three children. The little boy is still hospitalized and is “safe”, according to the prosecutor.
