By Premiumkosova It’s amazing to think that somebody could abandon a young child and they would live on their own for an extended amount of time. It almost seems like a storyline for a movie, but it actually happened in France.
The young boy was left at home alone by his mother during the COVID pandemic when she went off to live with her boyfriend. She was living, at the time, three years away from the apartment in Nersac, where they had lived together. He is now nine years old and is refusing to see his mother.
During the time that he was living on his own, he could not turn the heat on and had to shower with cold water and wrap himself in three blankets during the winter to keep warm. Even though he put up with a lot, he still went to school every day and teachers said that he was ‘happy and well-adjusted’. He also kept his grades up.
According to some psychologists, sticking with this routine may have saved his life and his clean appearance kept teachers from recognizing that he had been abandoned. He also had a good attitude about working in school.
Eventually, a neighbor continually noticed the young boy walking to school on his own and she raised a red flag. It is also thought that neighbors had tried to express their concern for the boy’s mother previously between 2020 and 2022. She told them to mind their own business.
The young boy ate biscuits and would scavenge food from neighbors, including stealing tomatoes from a balcony nearby. According to the mayor of Nersac, Barbara Couturier, nobody was suspicious that he was going through such a difficult time.
She said: “He was smiling, a very good pupil, always clean and polite. Nothing suggested he was abandoned. I challenge anyone who can say they would have detected this situation.”
Investigators continue to talk to those at the school, just to get an understanding of how something could happen like this for so long and not be noticed. One of his fellow students said: “He told his mates that he ate his meals alone and took the bus alone. He didn’t go out and stayed home all the time.”
At this point, the boy has been placed in care and is living with a foster family. He does not want to see his mother, who claimed that her son was living with her.
Local media has been buzzing with the guilt that neighbors feel of not noticing something was wrong. One local resident said: “When there was a family and a village around the family, if the mother neglected the child, it didn’t matter too much, because the rest of the family and the whole village took care of the child. It’s not like that anymore.”