31, Lille, October 2021
In the middle of the night in Lille, while the city slept, Kevin Monard, a man of 31, is still riding through the streets of the Vauban district. With him, his faithful travelling companion: an Uber Eats delivery bag. The night of 25 to 26 October 2021 was supposed to be like any other for this courier in his thirties, born in Lille on 20 June 1990, doing one run after another to make a living.
It was around 2.50am. At the traffic-light junction linking Vauban to the Bois-Blancs district, place Leroux-de-Fauquemont, on the corner of rue de Turenne and boulevard de la Moselle, his small Peugeot Vivacity scooter was violently struck at high speed by an Audi A3. The impact was so brutal that Kevin went into cardiac and respiratory arrest. Although firefighters and the emergency medical service (Samu) tried to revive him for nearly an hour, he did not survive, dying at the scene, towards the Total petrol station.
The driver of the car, a 17-year-old minor already known to the police for driving without a licence, fled after the accident, abandoning the damaged Audi A3 a few streets away, with visible signs of the impact. The investigation revealed that the boy had taken the keys to the car his father had rented. Father and son were arrested the following Tuesday evening. The father was quickly released, but his son was taken into police custody. He was then brought before a magistrate, formally charged and held in a young offenders’ institution in the region.
No one witnessed the accident.
It was a police patrol that found the courier’s body, alone on the road. Around it lay his smashed scooter, scattered debris, and that Uber Eats bag, which raised a question: was he working that night? The company contacted the authorities to offer its help. “At this stage, we cannot confirm that this is a courier registered on Uber Eats, nor that he was making a delivery,” Uber France said on the Tuesday evening after the tragedy. The company then began its own analysis of computer data “concerning delivery activity near the scene of the accident and at the approximate time mentioned, to try to identify potential witnesses or the victim”. A police officer observed: “In this type of work, you sometimes get several couriers sharing the same account (unofficially), working it in shifts almost 24 hours out of 24.”
The investigation would show that he was indeed working, but no one was able to say what became of the case.
Behind the Uber Eats insulated bag found at the scene of the accident, there was a man, with his dreams, his hopes and his life. Kevin Monard, born on 20 June 1990 in Lille, whose last journey ended on a square in his home town, on a night in October 2021.