(Christian Science Monitor) It was a Friday afternoon in October 2020, and Coralie, a junior high school French teacher at Collège du Bois d’Aulne, had just gone for a walk in the nearby woods with her dog to clear her mind before the two-week school vacation.
It had been a stressful week. Her co-worker, Samuel Paty, had shown controversial images in his history class, and the whole school was on edge. That morning, she had tried to say hello to Mr. Paty but felt he was avoiding her gaze, scuttling off to class instead of making the usual jokes or initiating a game of table tennis in the teachers lounge.
She was back home when the messages in her teachers WhatsApp group started flooding in. Murder in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Decapitation. Teacher, dead.
