This Thursday, January 30, 2025, a school bus accident occurred not far from Châteaudun (Eure-et-Loir). A teenage girl died. The driver, who tested positive for cannabis, is also known for his not-so-gentle driving.
Blood tests confirmed the first saliva test: the school bus driver had consumed cannabis before the accident that killed a 15-year-old high school student on Thursday in Châteaudun (Eure-et-Loir), the prosecutor announced on Friday. The presence of this product, with a threshold higher than 0.5 nanograms, cannot correspond to so-called passive consumption as the driver claims, specified the public prosecutor of Chartres Frédéric Chevallier in a press release. The 26-year-old's police custody has been extended and he will be brought before a judge on Friday afternoon. The prosecutor will request that he be placed in pre-trial detention, the magistrate indicated.
According to RTL, the driver was known to students for his driving described as aggressive, abrupt and above all fast.“Most of my friends who knew the driver said it wasn't surprising […] They knew he was dangerous and that one day there would be an accident with him”, testifies Julia, an 18-year-old high school student. The latter also had friends present in the bus.
The person in custody stated “that it was not a question of consumption of narcotics, but of passive contamination which would explain the presence thus detected, not having consumed narcotics since last December”. He explained that it was his partner, who regularly uses, “who could be at the origin of this result. He specifies that he sometimes lights the joints that she smokes”. He reserved the right to request a counter-expertise, according to Mr. Chevallier. The Minister of Transport Philippe Tabarot, who had visited the scene on Thursday, had announced on RTL a reinforcement of the controls of the drivers, in particular “in terms of narcotics”.
Olivier Velter, the boss of the transport company of which the coach was part, specified on BFMTV that “this driver in particular has been checked every year for the last four years and each time the tests were negative”.
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“Involuntary manslaughter”
The bus driver also maintains his version of events, “that of the presence of a third-party vehicle whose maneuver would have forced him to deviate from his trajectory, causing him to lose control of his bus”, around 7:40 a.m. Thursday morning.
According to information collected by the'AFP, he had been working on this line for several years, at least since the beginning of the year 32B, which serves six establishments. The road where the accident took place, the D927, has been described as “dangerous” by the municipality. The hearings of all witnesses continue. “Among them, the driver of a vehicle that was driving behind the bus had a camera in his vehicle that may allow the conditions of the accident to be assessed”, the prosecutor explained.
But according to initial investigations, “the crossing of the bus with a third vehicle at the time of the accident would not be confirmed by the analysis of this camera”. The Minister of Transport had said that he had contacted the Land Transport Accident Investigation Bureau (BEA) to determine the exact circumstances of this accident. A technical inspection of the bus had been carried out at the end of last year.
“Autopsy”
An investigating judge will be notified on Friday afternoon by the Chartres public prosecutor's office. The facts will notably be reclassified as “involuntary manslaughter aggravated by the fact that the driver was driving after using a narcotic, involuntary injuries aggravated by the same circumstance with temporary incapacity for work of less than three months”, adds the prosecutor.
Read also: School bus accident in Eure-et-Loir: the deceased student is a 15-year-old high school student, around forty injured… what we know
The maximum sentence for these offences is seven years in prison, he specifies. The mutual aid and solidarity between the students who were on the bus had been reported by local elected officials, “the big ones opening the hatches to get out of there” . The autopsy of the body of Johanna, a 15-year-old girl from the Emile-Zola high school in the town who died in the accident, is underway at the IML in Garches and the results will be known on Friday afternoon.
Twenty other students had been injured in relative emergencies and fourteen were taken to the town hospital. But no one was hospitalized on Friday, according to the prosecutor's office. The highest total work interruption was set at 21 days for one of them. Psychological support units have been activated, at least until the next school holidays, while the Minister of Education Elisabeth Borne will visit the victim's establishment on Monday.