Tragic Drowning in Marrakech Hotel Jacuzzi Leaves French Family Seeking Closure

8 March 2021 – bySylvanus@Bladi · 2 min read

While Ludovic, a 34-year-old cook from Rennes, had gone to Morocco with his partner Melissa to spend a few days there as a couple, he drowned in the jacuzzi of the Grand Hotel in Marrakech on March 13, 2020. Without any medical expertise, the body of the thirty-year-old still rests in a vault, preventing his wife from burying her husband with dignity.

"We arrived on March 9 and were supposed to leave on Friday the 13th. Around 5:30 pm, half an hour before taking the taxi, my husband wanted to try the hotel’s jacuzzi. After a quarter of an hour, not seeing him come back, I went to see him," Mélissa Lefèvre tells Actu Rennes. Ludovic was at the bottom of the water, his back stuck to the floor. She jumps into the pool to get him out. Without success. "I screamed and about ten people rushed over. No one could get him unstuck because of the suction of the jacuzzi," she remembers. The resuscitation attempts fail. Finally, an ambulance arrives and takes him to the hospital.

"I had been pushed aside and I didn’t even know if he was alive," sighs Mélissa, who is eventually taken to the hospital. "There, a doctor told me: ’it’s over’. I collapsed." The next day, she was allowed to see her husband. "His face was purple and the body was all swollen, this vision terrified me," she describes. After announcing the news to her two children, aged 10 and 13, she looks for ways to return to France. Complicated. Morocco had just suspended its air links.

She spends nearly 48 hours at the Marrakech airport before finding the last seat on a plane to Paris, on Sunday, March 15. Her husband’s body will be repatriated a few days later. "We were able to hold a small ceremony on March 19 and Ludovic is provisionally resting in a vault in the Cimetière de l’Est, pending an autopsy," Mélissa confides.

Without any news of the investigation, the date of the forensic examination of Ludovic’s body, she calls on the services of Maxime Tessier, a lawyer at the Rennes bar. "I was received last week (late February 2021, editor’s note) by the Rennes prosecutor’s office, which told me that a judicial investigation would be opened and entrusted to an investigating judge," the lawyer said. A small step forward. The witnesses to the drama at the hotel, mostly French, will be able to be heard by the justice system. Better, an autopsy shoul

Category: France

Keywords:

France Marrakesh Rennes Death