Solliès-Pont is a small town in the Var, in the hills a short drive north of the naval port of Toulon. In September 1995 Eric Borel lived there with his mother, his stepfather and his eleven-year-old half-brother. He was sixteen and a high school student. Neighbors told reporters afterward that he was quiet and withdrawn, that he seemed to have no friends, and that he did not answer when people greeted him. They said he often dressed in black. His father, the Associated Press reported, had recently died of cancer.
Over the next day and a half he killed his family and then strangers in the next village.
The first killings took place in the family home, overnight from Saturday, September 23, into Sunday, September 24. Accounts disagree on the timing: Reuters, quoting police, said Saturday; United Press International said before dawn on Sunday.
They also disagree on how the three were killed. The first police accounts, carried by AP, UPI and Reuters, said Borel used a hammer and a baseball bat. Later accounts give a different picture. The journalist Bruno Masi, who spent three years reconstructing the case for his 2020 book 8 kilomètres, and a 2025 episode of RTL radio's L'Heure du crime both say the victims were shot with a .22 long rifle. In the radio account, Borel's stepfather was shot and then struck with a hammer, his mother was shot in the head and her body hidden in a wardrobe, and his half-brother was shot while watching television. The radio program named the mother as Marie-Jeanne Parenti, thirty-six, and the stepfather as Yves Bichet, forty-eight.
The bodies were found on Sunday by Bichet's elder son, twenty-one, according to the RTL account. Gendarmes briefly held him for questioning. Eric Borel was missing.
Borel left the house with a rifle and set off on foot, at night, toward Cuers, the next village. Masi's title gives the distance as eight kilometers, about five miles. The early wire reports estimated it at three to four miles. Masi's reconstruction, as summarized in reviews of the book, has Borel walking for about eleven hours, waiting for daylight before he went to see a friend.
The friend was a seventeen-year-old boy named Alan. According to the RTL account, he was shot at close range in front of his home in Cuers and died later that day in a hospital in Marseille. Reviews of Masi's book say about eleven hours passed between the killings in Solliès-Pont and Alan's murder.
Around eight in the morning, the newsstand owner Frederic Bares saw a young man walk past carrying a rifle. He took him for a hunter.
For about half an hour, Borel walked through the center of Cuers and shot at whoever he saw. AP's account places the shootings in a parking lot, outside a bank and on the town square where villagers did their Sunday shopping. An elderly woman was shot while walking her dog. A seventy-five-year-old tailor was shot in the head and chest in front of the local café, UPI reported. An elderly man was shot on his way to a café. Two people were killed while drawing money from the bank's cash machine. A man playing boules on the square was shot.
Witnesses described a gunman who never hurried. Guy Sintes, who owned a café on the square, told reporters, "He was very calm, very sedate." Borel put the gun to his shoulder as if he were "shooting birds," Sintes said. A woman told the radio station France-Info that he was shooting at everything that moved. Witnesses told Reuters that he reloaded calmly between shots. According to AP and Reuters, at one point he turned back to a man he had already wounded and shot him again, in the head.
A gendarme arriving on the scene told the doctor on duty, in the RTL reconstruction, "Une tuerie est en cours dans le village": a massacre is under way in the village. An emergency medical post was set up in Cuers, and helicopters flew the most seriously wounded to the hospital in Toulon.
The shooting ended when Borel turned the rifle on himself. UPI reported that he shot himself as police arrived; Livres Hebdo, describing Masi's book, says he shot himself in the mouth.
The death toll rose for days, and the numbers in the press never quite agreed. On the Sunday, UPI reported eight dead and nine wounded. AP reported twelve dead, the three at the house and nine in Cuers, with eight wounded, three of them seriously; its own report said police had found seven bodies in the streets. Reuters, the next day, counted thirteen dead: three in Solliès-Pont, nine in Cuers, and a fifty-nine-year-old man who died of his wounds on Monday. It added that a boy was fighting for his life and six others were hurt. The victims in Cuers ranged in age from seventeen to seventy-five, AP reported.
Later accounts settle on fifteen killed. France 3 headlined its thirtieth-anniversary report in 2025 "la tuerie de Cuers ayant fait 15 morts," and RTL's 2025 program describes Borel as having shot fifteen people. Livres Hebdo gives sixteen dead, a figure that appears to include Borel himself. One review of Masi's book counts the three family members, Alan and twelve people in Cuers, which would make sixteen victims.
No one ever found out, and with Borel dead there was no trial to try. Police told Reuters they had found pictures of Adolf Hitler and neo-Nazi literature in his bedroom, and called him apparently a neo-Nazi fanatic. Neighbors told French television that his walls were covered with Hitler posters and neo-Nazi themes. AP reported that the motive was unclear, and UPI that police could not say what had prompted the attacks. A review of Masi's book attributes the killings to an extreme adolescent despair and to the family situation, without going further.
The French press reached for comparisons. The daily France-Soir ran a headline that Reuters translated as "The carnage of the crazy teenager" over a front-page photograph of a victim beneath a bloodstained sheet. UPI called it the worst multiple killing in France since 1989, when Christian Dornier, thirty-one, killed fourteen people, among them his mother and sister, and was later found not responsible by reason of insanity.
Cuers's mayor, Guy Guigou, said the day of the shooting, "The people are devastated. The village is in a state of shock." The village has held a ceremony for the victims every year since.
Beyond the Var, the killings faded quickly. They came during a season of bombings in France, after the July 1995 attack on the Saint-Michel station of the Paris RER, and within a week the hunt for the bombing suspect Khaled Kelkal, who was shot dead by police near Lyon, filled the front pages. Reviewers of Bruno Masi's book, written twenty-five years later, noted how little trace the case had left in the country's memory. Masi was twenty and a student in Toulouse in 1995; his mother, who worked at the hospital in Toulon, phoned him that day to tell him what had happened. His book, published by JC Lattès in January 2020, drew on interviews with a Var-Matin reporter who covered the killings, a forensic doctor, and a friend of Alan's and her parents.
July 1995: A bombing at the Saint-Michel station of the Paris RER opens a season of attacks in France.
September 23-24, 1995: Overnight, Borel kills his mother, his stepfather and his eleven-year-old half-brother at the family home in Solliès-Pont.
September 24, 1995: After walking through the night to Cuers, Borel shoots his friend Alan, then fires on people in the center of the village for about half an hour before shooting himself.
The next day: A fifty-nine-year-old man wounded in Cuers dies, and Reuters counts thirteen dead.
January 2020: JC Lattès publishes Bruno Masi's book 8 kilomètres.
2025: France 3 marks the thirtieth anniversary with a report on the fifteen dead.