[How About This Book?] The Man Who Caused His Mother's Death Sat a Meter Away... He Never Spoke to Him

The more he learned about the perpetrator, the murkier the explanation became... An investigation that questions anger: The Collision
Paul Gasnier's 13-year journey, beginning with the 2012 "collision" in Lyon

The man was sitting one seat away. About a meter from him. Paul Gasnier had imagined this moment for more than a decade: facing the man who had caused his mother's death. He could have accepted an apology or demanded answers. But he did not get up. He had nothing to say.

French journalist and writer Paul Gasnier lost his mother in a traffic accident in 2012. More than a decade later, he reopened the case files and traced the life of the young man responsible, as well as the divisions in French society surrounding him. The book documenting his investigation is titled *A Collision of Lives*. Diverto

The man's name was Said. At 5:13 p.m. on June 6, 2012, he raced up a narrow hill in Croix-Rousse, Lyon, France, on a motorcycle. He had no license and had been smoking cannabis. Riding at 80 km/h with the front wheel lifted in front of his friends, he struck a 54-year-old woman riding a bicycle. She died a week later. She was Gasnier's mother.

Viewed as a case, it is not hard to explain: an innocent woman, a young man from an immigrant family with a long criminal record, drugs and driving without a license, and a death. A few paragraphs in the newspaper's crime section would be enough to separate victim from perpetrator and direct the anger toward its target. Gasnier, too, was angry for a long time. He was 21.

At the time, he was in Mumbai, India. He had to decide whether to donate his mother's organs, and he arranged her funeral. At the spot where his mother had collapsed, Said's friends tried to move the motorcycle involved in the crash and got into a fight with passersby. It took the police four days to find the motorcycle. Gasnier later likened the anger he felt then to "a drug-like pleasure" that lulls people to sleep and makes reality seem simple.

What prompted him to write the book was not the accident, but a political rally ten years later. It was the 2022 French presidential election. By then a journalist, Gasnier was covering a rally for far-right politician Eric Zemmour. Heated rhetoric poured forth about immigrant crime, repeat offenders, and a broken justice system. As he listened, something felt strange. The "victim" the politician was talking about seemed to be him. His mother's death was being explained all too neatly in someone else's political rhetoric.

He went home and opened the case files he had kept shut for ten years. This is where the investigation in The Collision changes direction. The son spends more time looking into Said, the man who caused his mother's death, than into his dead mother. He reads police reports and court records and seeks out police officers, judges, lawyers, social workers, and people who knew Said. He wants to understand how someone became the person he was.

The more he investigated, the more the familiar story kept coming apart. Said's parents had moved from Morocco to France. His father served in the French military and spent his working life on construction sites. His mother also worked in cleaning and childcare. Said was born and raised in Lyon. By contrast, Gasnier's mother and family moved between Prague, Milan, and London. Gasnier says Said was much more of a "Lyonnais" than he was. Set against the two families, the label "rootless," so often attached to immigrants, seems to point in the wrong direction.

Poverty, either, was not a sufficient answer. Even the lives of the siblings who grew up in the same home were different. His brother entered the world of drugs, while his sisters focused on their studies and built different lives. As an adult, Said started a family and a business, but never completely escaped the moments when he committed crimes. If society made him who he was, his choices still remain; if it came down to personal choice, the environment in which he grew up and the failure of institutions still remain.

In the end, Gasnier arrives at a strange place. He says that after investigating Said more deeply than anyone else, he understands him less than he did at the outset. That failure is precisely where the book's power lies. The Collision does not say that understanding a perpetrator makes it possible to forgive him, nor that poverty and immigration lead to crime. It does not say Said bears no responsibility, either. He did not intend to kill anyone, but he rode the motorcycle as if it were a weapon. Gasnier never lets go of that fact. He draws a line between understanding and absolution, and keeps asking questions from that line.

So perhaps it is only natural that he had nothing to say when he finally met Said in court. The "perpetrator" he had imagined for ten years was easy to hate with a single word. Said, who had become a person with a life in the documents, was much harder to make sense of. It was not something that could be resolved by striking up a conversation and hearing an explanation. His life was already saying more than his words could.

There is also a curious postscript. Published in France, The Collision made the first selection for the 2025 Prix Goncourt and won the Goncourt des Detenus, judged by inmates in prisons across the country. Later, an inmate who had read the book in prison told Gasnier that he, too, had killed someone in a motorcycle joyride. He reportedly said that after reading the book, he would never do anything like that again.

A book that began with someone's death was read by someone who had killed another person. Even so, it is hard to call this an ending of reconciliation. Asked whether he had forgiven Said, Gasnier says he is "still working on it." Perhaps that degree of incompleteness is fitting for this book.

The time of the accident can be reconstructed down to 5:13 p.m. The motorcycle's speed, the moment the police received the report, and who did what after the crash all come back to life in the records. Yet even after reading all 252 pages, Said as a person cannot be reconstructed in a single sentence.

Perhaps that is what a proper investigation does. It does not end with learning what you did not know; it makes you uncertain again about what you thought you knew all too easily.

The Collision | Hugo | Written by Paul Gasnier | Translated by Jo Minyoung | 252 pages

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