Anger rumbles, buzzes, backfires. This July 26, 2023, two hundred motorcycles rev their engines as they go up the departmental road which cuts through La Haye-Malherbe (Eure), a Norman village of 1,400 inhabitants. Thus begins the white march for Enzo, 15 years old, killed by a stab wound four days earlier. The noise of the engines, a tribute to the teenager keen on cross-country asphalt, makes an elected official present among the thousand people shudder.
The Enzo affair emerged in the national news twenty days after the urban riots of the summer. A first name that has become a symbol of hexagonal fractures. From a rural France, white and popular, ignored by the elites, for which the Bolloré group media have become the sounding board.. “Killed for a look”, broadcast on the white banner of the CNews channel. The show “L’Heure des pros” opened with the boy’s death. “Why, why isn’t anyone talking about it?” », repeats the host. “We are the only ones talking about Enzo”he concludes, although many media are recalling the news, The Louviers Dispatch, the AFP, The ParisianBFM-TV or TF1.
Enzo’s first name also appears on the front page of the first Sunday newspaper (JDD) of the Geoffroy Lejeune era, editorial director from Current values. The newspaper that entered the Bolloré universe was repaired on August 6, after a historic strike. A failure: on the newsstands, it’s a photo of a tribute to another Enzo, a teenager hit by a car six months earlier, in the Landes, which spread out. Geoffroy Lejeune publicly denies the illustration error. But, quietly, the iconographer of JDD is ousted. Under the headline “We are not a news item”, an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, signed by Enzo’s parents, evokes “criminals with overly recurring profiles”pit victims against “this so-called priority France” and wonder about what “is called the rule of law”. Between the lines: the boy would have been the victim of repeat offenders from the projects.
In La Haye-Malherbe, a town where, say the inhabitants, nothing happens ” never anything “, the emotion overflows. On July 23, the day after the murder, the prosecution announced the opening of an investigation into intentional homicide. Two minors are in police custody. At 10 a.m., France 3 Normandie reports a word from the mayor, Serge Marais. “It seems that the attack took place for a simple look, which would not have pleased”delivers the chosen one without a label, shocked. La Dépêche du Midi title: “The attack took place for a simple look”.
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