The child’s body was found on Sunday around 5:00 p.m. in a wooded area on the bank of the Vilaine, not far from the city center.
According to a police source, the alert was given after a fisherman heard the cries of an unlocated child, then called the police.
Monday morning, many police officers were still present on the scene, with tape blocking access to the place where the boy was found. Several police cars were taking this street in a city crushed by unusual heat for the month of May.
Firefighter divers in dry suits inspected the river for clues, under the gaze of police officers, noted an AFP journalist.
A few meters away, rue Dupont des Loges, rare passers-by comment on the news item that is shaking the Breton capital.
“It’s the most complete disarray, a child of around ten years old… it’s barely credible,” laments Stéphane, 57, who went to buy the regional daily Ouest-France to find out more about the tragedy.
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Hypotheses
In the immediate vicinity of where the body was discovered, a resident is repainting the gates of his house. The district, rather wealthy, is called by the people of Rennes “little California”, explains Amaury, a 49-year-old craftsman, who prefers not to give his last name.
“There is a camp of marginalized people right next door, when we heard the firefighters and the police yesterday we said to ourselves that one of them had fallen into the Vilaine,” he says.
“Then we learned what happened and the police came to question us. Was it a stupid teenager’s game that went wrong or a weirdo who attacked him?” he asks, summarizing the two hypotheses frequently heard by local residents questioned by the AFP.
While waiting to have answers on the exact circumstances of the tragedy, his wife asked one of his children to no longer go fishing in the area.
On the other side of the bank, numerous journalists were interviewing the occasional walker and filming the divers.
“A quiet neighborhood? Ugh… There are those who sleep outside and there is a detoxification center not far away, no it’s not ‘safe'”, notes Daniel Enocq, 63, janitor, who himself often casts his fishing rod to find a roach or a perch in the very place where the body was found. been found.
He also recalls that a septuagenarian was killed at her home in March 2025 in a building located right next door. A forty-year-old was indicted for rape and murder in this case.
“It’s a tragedy. My little idea is that it’s a story between kids,” he says about the death of the eleven-year-old boy.
A 29-year-old woman, who requested anonymity, was “completely surprised” when she heard the news.
“I am the mother of two children aged six and three, we say to ourselves that it could be ours,” she says, pushing her daughter in a stroller.
