Tragic Discovery: Elderly Tenant Found Dead Years After Rent Payments Ceased

The old man’s body was discovered on September 22nd last. According to a police source, Mohand Alouache was sitting on the floor. Since 2003, this man who arrived in France in 1970 had been living alone in this building on Rue Hippolyte-Mulin and paying a monthly rent of 280 euros. At the time, he was already on unemployment. He had worked in the construction industry for decades. Since 2019, he had no longer responded to a social investigation, by mail exchange, to take stock of his situation and income, as all social housing tenants do. But he regularly paid his rent. Since February 2023, nothing. No sign of life.

Montrouge Habitat, the city’s social housing office, notes six months of unpaid rent. An eviction procedure was then initiated and validated by the court at the beginning of this year. After an unsuccessful payment order, a bailiff issued an order to vacate the premises, last February. The tenant did not react. This is how, last September, the police and the bailiff went to Montrouge to carry out Mohand’s eviction. But the old man had been dead for more than two years. "The initial autopsy results do not make it possible to determine the date of his death or to be certain of its causes, even if at this stage no trace of external intervention has been detected," says the Nanterre prosecutor’s office.

Only the expected additional analyses will make it possible to retrace the end of Mohand Alouache’s life. His neighbors were a thousand miles away from imagining that a decomposed body was in one of the apartments. "The gentleman on the first floor? No, I’ve never seen him," testifies one of his young neighbors, like other long-time residents here. According to the police report, "the clutter of the premises suggested the Diogenes syndrome, the main symptom of which is syllogomania, that is to say a tendency to accumulate objects," says Le Parisien.