Éric Borel

The series of attacks started on 23 September 1995, at about 6:00 p.m. CET, when Borel killed his stepfather, Yves Bichet, in the kitchen by shooting him four times with an Anschütz .22-caliber rifle, before smashing his head with a hammer. Police assumed that they had a quarrel beforehand, when Borel tried to run away from home. Next, Borel assaulted his half-brother, 11-year-old Jean-Yves Bichet, who was watching television, in a similar manner. After wiping up the blood trails, Borel waited for his mother to come home.

On 23 October 1995, Jeanne Laugiero, 68, died in hospital from injuries sustained in the shooting, raising the death toll to fourteen victims. The last death in the killing spree was 68-year-old Pierre Marigliano, who succumbed to his wounds on 2 March 1996, bringing the death toll to fifteen. Borel's shooting spree was the deadliest act of mass murder in France since Christian Dornier killed fourteen people in Luxiol on 12 July 1989.

Many reports erroneously stated that Borel's room was full of Nazi paraphernalia, and rumors he was fascist sympathizer were spurred even more by the fact that his stepfather had attended several meetings of the Front National in 1989. But besides a picture of Adolf Hitler cut out from a newspaper, graffiti displaying a swastika on his door, a few books on World War II, as well as a documentary about the Waco siege, no evidence was found after his death that he was interested in any kind of politics. A girl from Cuers spread a story that Borel had told her about his relationship with his half-sister Caroline, who was supposed to be his pregnant girlfriend. However, the sister in question did not exist, nor was it true that his father had died of cancer shortly before his rampage.

Éric Borel (French: [bɔʁɛl]; 11 December 1978 – 24 September 1995) was a French high school student and spree killer who, at the age of 16, murdered his family in Solliès-Pont in the arrondissement of Toulon on 23 September 1995, and afterwards shot dead twelve other people and injured four more in the village of Cuers the next day. When police arrived at the scene, Borel shot himself.