Baby-sitter condemned in Paris for abandoning 11-year-old autistic child
A 26-year-old Parisian baby-sitter has received a one-year suspended prison sentence for leaving alone a non-verbal autistic adolescent locked in insanitary conditions.
Baby-sitter condemned after repeatedly abandoning autistic child in Paris
A 26-year-old woman was sentenced on Monday 5 October to one year in prison with a suspended sentence by a Paris court for abandoning an 11-year-old adolescent, severely autistic and non-verbal, whom she was tasked with minding. According to sudouest.fr, the court also imposed a permanent ban on her exercising any activity involving minors.
The discovery
On the evening of 27 June 2025, emergency services intervened in the 20th arrondissement of Paris after a neighbour reported children's screams and banging sounds against a wall. They discovered the adolescent naked, locked in his bedroom from the outside by a bolt and a sheet tied to the facing door.
The emergency services described in their report an odour "barely tolerable and suffocating". The overheated room, with a window lacking a handle, was covered with gastric and faecal matter as well as food waste.
The child's father, who lives alone with his son, is away on a work trip abroad and remains unreachable. The baby-sitter, supposed to mind the child in alternation with another person, cannot be found.
The defendant's partial admissions
In the middle of the night, the baby-sitter, named Elvire, presents herself to the police. She claims she was absent "only for a short hour" to collect her diabetes medication. A telephone investigation reveals a very different reality: she abandoned the child on several occasions over the course of the week, for up to ten consecutive hours, in order to carry out other paid childminding duties.
Her lawyer, François Stefanaggi, defended her at the hearing by contending that she had "inherited responsibility for a situation she was unable to manage". Absent from the hearing for medical reasons, the defendant suffers from mental anorexia and hoarding disorder, according to a psychiatric assessment.
Reactions at the hearing
The defence lawyer also blamed the father, judging it "inadmissible" to leave an autistic child for a week in the care of an unqualified person. The lawyer representing the parents, Ms Camilla Quendolo, civil parties in the case, recalled that "the care of autistic children in France remains very deficient".
Ms Véronique Boulay, who represented the adolescent at the hearing, highlighted the specific vulnerability of the victim: "If the child was locked in a room in insanitary conditions, it is because he is disabled. If she left him, it is because she decided to go and earn money by doing other baby-sitting jobs, and this is not going to report her since he did not speak."
Source: 7sur7 Faits Divers