"If you don't look, you don't find": the expert on the grill at the Rue d'Aubagne trial

The Marseille Criminal Court continued on Monday its examination of the failings attributed to the 16 defendants tried in this tragedy of unfit housing, which left eight dead on November 5, 2018. And particularly in the three weeks preceding the tragedy, when visits from experts and craftsmen multiplied after distress alerts from tenants who could no longer open their doors and saw the cracks widening.

"As of October 18, there were no warning signs that would have led me to believe that a collapse could have occurred," expert Richard Carta repeated.

That day, the firefighters had evacuated the building. The tenants were crying and screaming, says the former head of Urban Civil Security for the city of Marseille. What he saw worried him, particularly a partition in the entrance hall. An expert was then urgently appointed by the administrative courts to give his opinion on the existence of a serious and imminent danger.

Richard Carta, now 66 years old, an experienced and renowned architect, arrives at nightfall. Based on visual observations, as is customary, he recommends the demolition and reconstruction of the famous partition, the shoring up of the ground floor and notes a "worrying" crack on the façade.

But he completed his visit in an hour, did not go to see the cellar, did not ask any questions of the tenants, nor did he question the municipal employees or the trustee about the history of this building which had been the subject of several alerts since 2014.

"Hard to cope"

"I didn't go into that cellar and what would I have seen?" explains Richard Carta, prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter and involuntary injury, recalling that "the construction code does not provide for a minimum period" for an expert appraisal.

"It's always the same, when you don't look, you don't find," President Pascal Gand responds curtly.

In the cellar, the expert reportedly saw a pole in a state of disintegration.

"You spent an hour, you didn't ask any questions, you didn't look at everything," Me Céline Lendo then challenged him, emphasizing his "lack of curiosity, of interest."

His client, the father of Simona Carpignano, the 30-year-old Italian woman who died in the collapse, had noticed, without being an expert, an abnormal inclination of the stairwell.

"It's hard to hear what I'm hearing and it hurts," shouts Richard Carta, who is losing his temper for the first time after more than three weeks of hearings where he has always shown great respect for the court and the 90 or so civil parties.

At the end of his visit, the expert had indeed issued an opinion of serious and imminent danger, while recommending the reinstatement of the occupants with the exception of a tenant on the first floor.

- "Did you have difficulty accepting that you gave the order, the instruction, to reinstate everyone except Mr. Rahmani?" the president asked.

- "It's true that (during the investigation) I was in a position that makes you feel confused and very bad," replied the defendant, with a neatly trimmed white beard.

The town hall, indirectly sued via Julien Ruas, then deputy to the LR mayor at the time Jean-Claude Gaudin, had followed these recommendations. Two and a half weeks later, the building collapsed, taking eight people with it.

"The expert proposes, the municipality disposes," testified the former president of the administrative court of Marseille from 2018 to 2012, quoted by Mr. Carta's defense: "At the time, the document that the expert produced was a necessary prerequisite" for a city to be able to evacuate a building, indicated another expert architect.

This central question in this trial, which is due to last until December 18, has since been resolved since municipalities can now do without the advice of an expert to evacuate a building deemed dangerous.