Story By: Joseph Golder, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Newsflash
The rotting corpse of a young disabled woman has been found in a flat in an advanced state of decomposition with her distraught mother lying next to it, and investigators were shocked to discover she had been dead for weeks.
The social services have been slammed for reportedly taking weeks to investigate the situation despite it having been flagged up to them by a neighbour.
The incident took place in the city of Narbonne, in the southern French department of Aude, in a flat near the Docteur Lacroix high school, as lockdown measures in France begin to ease.
The mum is said to be suffering from significant psychological problems and was known in the neighbourhood to often scream and cry in public and in her flat.
But for over a month, there had been a strange silence in the area, with one neighbour eventually flagging up the oddity to the social services.
They reportedly dragged their feet and took weeks to look into it and when they finally did, they discovered that the woman, believed to be about 30, had died and her body had been rotting in the flat for weeks.
Local media report that the air emanating from the flat carried a “pestilential smell”.
The mum and daughter are said to have been living in very poor conditions, with the precarious nature of their situation exacerbated by the fact that the mother was found “living in the middle of rubbish” that canvassed the whole flat.
The mother, who has not been named due to local privacy laws, and who had not notified the authorities of her daughter’s death, has been hospitalised.
The Narbonne prosecutor’s office, meanwhile, has opened an investigation.
An autopsy has been performed on the corpse of the young woman, who has not been named in reports, and it has been determined that she died of natural causes.
The social services, meanwhile, have been blasted by netizens, who have expressed their shock at the delay for looking into the matter.
One netizen called ‘alainnono’ said: “Unacceptable. A deficiency of the social services, poor France!!”
While ‘gg91’ said: “These social services act after a few weeks, the time for the body’s decomposition to be “advanced”. I hope they will all get a bonus to reward their responsiveness! Or a new demonstration of officials who do not care about their oath to serve the public, it’s so much nicer to read your newspaper or watch TV series on your smartphone…”
And ‘EVap’ said: “Victims of lockdown…”
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