A second home destroyed by fire in Vacqueville

On the night of a Friday to a Saturday, around one o'clock in the morning, Dr. Ripoche, driving on the Louvières road, saw flames coming out of the roof of an isolated house in the hamlet of Vacqueville, in Vierville-sur-Mer. The Trévières firefighters, alerted, could not save this five-room second home or its furniture: only the walls remained standing.

The fire seemed to have caught in the kitchen. The next morning, the Trévières gendarmes found that a shutter and a window of this room had been forced, suggesting an intrusion.

The house belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Henri Laloux, domiciled in Omerville, Val-d'Oise. In seventeen years, they had redone all the rooms and built an extension. Coming at the beginning of the week, they had left on Wednesday afternoon, after cutting off the electricity and turning off the gas as usual. The house was therefore unoccupied at the time of the disaster.

Arriving on Saturday morning, they suspected an act of vandalism. They said they had already suffered several burglaries, this intrusion being, according to them, the sixth. They kept old furniture, cabinets and tables, but no longer left precious objects. The damage was estimated at more than 700,000 francs.

The firefighters of Trévières, helped by a few men from Bayeux, stayed all night. The Trévières gendarmes, Captain Le Berre de Bayeux and the mayor went there. The investigation was to determine whether the fire was actually the result of a malicious act.

Reconstructed or uncertain passages:
- The mayor is named "Jean-Pierre Oxéant" in this denomination, while other sources from the same period give Jean-Marie Oxéant. The uncertain first name is not reproduced in the story. Voluntary origin is a hypothesis of the investigation, not an established conclusion.

Archive image: https://vierville.cordelle.eu/PhDoc10/1992Mai11-faitdivers.jpg