Report blasts Lille medical school after student dies at induction party in 2021

The day before, he had learned of his admission to the second year of medicine. A piece of news that is celebrated after a year that is known to be particularly trying. In the customs of the Faculty of Medicine of Lille, as in others in Francethe winners participate in integration evenings organized by those who won this competition a year earlier.

This is how Simon Guermonprez, 19, found himself, on July 8, 2021, at 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 highway in the early hours of July 9, hit by a truck. What happened between the moment he left the party, his arm marked with eight lines in felt-tip pen, a way of indicating that he had consumed eight doses of alcohol, and this macabre discovery? The police who investigated this tragedy assume that the young man wanted to take a selfie on a bridge spanning the highway, a few hundred meters from his home, that his phone had fallen and that he had gone down to the highway to retrieve it.

This tragedy is not the first to follow integration evenings organized by medical students from Lille, as recalled in the report of the General Inspectorate of Education, Sport and Research (IGESR), seized after Simon’s death. It returns to “serious events” occurred in 2012a sexual assault following which integration was officially banned by the faculty. “But it continued to take place in full view of everyone.”the document acknowledges. In 2015, during one of these evenings, organized in a campsite, a student disappeared. He was found ten days later, drowned in a pond. In 2020 and 2021, two rapes were reported, then three serious injuries.

On Wednesday, September 4, the Lille Criminal Court was to have tried three students – a young man and two young women aged between 20 and 21 at the time of the events – for hazing and incitement to excessive alcohol consumption, for two of them, and for complicity in hazing for the student at whose home part of this evening was held. The truck driver was, for his part, sent back for involuntary manslaughter. The trial was postponed to February 11, 2025, at the request of all the lawyers, both defense and civil party.

“Desire for omerta”

Like his colleagues, the lawyer for Simon Guermonprez’s family, Mr.^e Damien Legrand “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 “delivered its conclusions in March 2022”He will therefore ask that the heads of the medical faculty also appear before the Lille judges next February, not as simple witnesses, but to be judged there as well. “Simon’s father wants such a tragedy to never happen again. However, we have the feeling that the faculty is washing its hands of the matter because it is not happening on its premises.”confides M.^e Legrand.

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