Four days after his disappearance in Deux-Sèvres, Erwan Blais, 18, remains nowhere to be found. The research is expanding.
The search has continued since Sunday and the disappearance of Erwan Blais. An investigation into a “disturbing disappearance” was opened by the Niort public prosecutor’s office. At this stage, no avenue is still favored. The authorities launched a wanted notice on Monday, February 12 after the disappearance of the 18-year-old. He was seen leaving a nightclub called La Morinière in Moncoutant-sur-Sèvre, in Deux-Sèvres, on the night of Saturday to Sunday around 2:30 a.m. Investigators said this is the last location his phone was believed to have been geolocated.
Tuesday, February 13, the search accelerated, notes BFMTV, according to which a drone as well as divers were mobilized. The news channel also reports that the number of gendarmes mobilized on the case has been multiplied by three. Thus, while around twenty gendarmes were in place Tuesday morning, no less than 63 were on the bridge in the afternoon, said a press release from the public prosecutor. But the searches were again in vain.
This Wednesday, the gendarmes are continuing the search, particularly in the Pescalis park in Moncoutant-sur-Sèvre, which is none other than the largest nature and fishing activity park in Europe. It is located not far from the nightclub where Erwan Blais was last seen alive this weekend. The park was closed to the public for the day. The authorities also widened the search area. Indeed, Vendée is now part of the investigations.
According to BFMTV, the young man left the nightclub where he was partying with his friends around 2:30 a.m. He would have been kicked out by security guards after a “no serious” incident. He would then appear on video surveillance images of the nightclub. “We see him crossing the parking lot of the nightclub, then nothing because of a spotlight which dazzles the camera,” explained his stepmother Karine to the news channel, specifying that “Erwan is a fairly balanced teenager , comfortable in his sneakers, with a classic life of a young person continuing his studies. He is a young person like there are so many.” In any case, his phone would have stopped transmitting around 2:50 a.m.
With Ouest-France, a friend of Erwan Blais, who was with him on the evening of the disappearance, also spoke about the events. Assuring that the young man did not arrive drunk at the nightclub, but that he had, like him, “simply a little drunk”, he confided that he had, during the evening, separated from him, going see other friends. It was only at the end of the evening, when the nightclub was empty, that he would have realized her absence. Numerous searches in and around the nightclub followed, without success, before a call to the gendarmerie.
The trail of a parking lot was mentioned by the investigators. “We carried out tracking on Sunday and Monday with two dog teams, which led us to the same place, namely the parking lot of the Le Saint-Pierre restaurant,” revealed the gendarmerie to our colleagues at 20 Minutes.
But this path remains fragile. Once we arrived at the parking lot, “we lost track of the young man,” said the same source. According to the daily, it is in this parking lot that Erwan parked his vehicle before going, on foot, to the nightclub, located 500 meters away. A helicopter was therefore sent by the police. Objective: “to fly over the shoulders of the roads, in case the young man had been hit by a vehicle”, specified the gendarmerie, which however indicated that this “did nothing”. Surrounding ponds as well as the Sèvre Niortaise were also surveyed by a nautical brigade.
The young man’s family opened a Facebook page dedicated to his search allowing anyone with information to share it with the family and the authorities. In a Facebook post, the sister of the missing man specified that Erwan was wearing “black jeans, a dark green Nike sweatshirt, black and white sneakers” at the time of his disappearance.
His mother-in-law Karine, deeply distraught, spoke to BFMTV. Despite her worry, she remains hopeful and continues the search: “It’s vital, we can’t even imagine sitting around waiting. We’re trying to find something, the smallest element.” “If we had any hope, we would stop everything, we would collapse,” she adds with emotion. The family would imagine “everything that could have happened to him, whether it be the accident, the bad encounter, whether he is stranded, stuck, injured somewhere, whether he cannot move, his cell phone is broken, we considers everything and its opposite.
