Nine days after the assassination of his big brother Pengo Bossio Wangi, MMA hopeful killed in the racist attack in Trappes, his little sister Ritsia testified for the first time on the TF1 set. The shooter Kevin T., who admitted his act, was indicted and placed in pre-trial detention. “I expect justice to be firm, that it can also pay homage to my brother and that it can also give us peace. May the people be safe,” declared the 24-year-old young woman invited this Sunday, November 1, on the show “Sept à quatre”.
“I would just like to pay tribute to him, show people who he really was, and reproduce what he could give to others,” she confided, her voice choked with tears. Ritsia wanted to speak out to maintain the memory of her big brother, who died at the age of 26. Pengo Bossio Wangi was an amateur fighter, a young hopeful from his MMA club, the Atch Academy, in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis). Originally from Poissy, he lived in Guyancourt in Yvelines. This Friday, October 23, he was going to the town of Trappes where he was doing an internship to become a security guard, when he crossed paths with Kévin T. who killed him with around ten bullets.
For TF1, Ritsia returned to this day of October 23, when she was informed by a journalist that her brother was one of the victims of the Trappes shooting. At first she didn’t believe it, then “when my mother told me that the police were coming, I immediately understood that Pengo was dead. If he was alive, we would have gone to the hospital.”
“His dream was to have a family”
“I’m empty, I don’t believe it, it’s not realistic, it’s not true,” she murmurs, still in shock from the tragedy. She can’t help but imagine what he experienced in his last moments: “I know him by heart. I constantly put myself in his shoes. I just know he was very anxious. He must have felt great anguish, even shock, of injustice, incomprehension, of fear.” “What shocks me is that he was alone,” she continues. “We were supposed to see each other that evening, I spoke to him on the phone that morning,” she remembers with emotion.
She describes a “very protective big brother.” “I insist on the fact that he was very funny, very empathetic. He was very interested in people's lives, in their suffering. He was someone hypersensitive, full of love. He was an exceptional big brother.” With his brother and big sister, they were “really a close-knit family.” Ritsia tells the story of a boy without history, full of dreams: “We talked about everything, he knew my whole life and I knew his whole. We talked about our dreams and our ambitions. One of her dreams was to have a family, children, to be there for our weddings,” she recalls with great emotion. “For us, marriage was very important. He had to accompany us to the town hall, to the church,” she explains, her eyes misty with tears. “The goal was to be happy together. I can’t imagine life without him.”
“I’m waiting for people to realize that a human life is very important”
Since the tragedy, a lively debate has agitated the political class. The Génération.s mayor of Trappes, Ali Rabeh, called for being “collectively lucid” about the fact that certain “speeches […] ideologically arm those who are capable of taking action”. “It actually seemed very interesting to me because yes, it’s actually true, it doesn’t come out of nowhere,” the young woman simply breathes. For her brother's funeral, she wants the tributes to be public: "I think in terms of him, he has many, many friends, people who support him, it has to be public, that's a certainty," she says.
The young woman was very touched by the white march which was organized on Sunday October 25 in Aubervilliers where she felt “a lot of love”. “I felt the people united. It did me a lot of good but it also made me realize.” She expects a lot of appeasement from the national tribute that will be organized for her brother. “I’m waiting for peace, I’m tired of everything I hear around. I hope that people can realize that a human life has a lot of importance, that it can destroy a family, that it shatters dreams, ambitions. He had his whole life ahead of him,” she concludes.
“A real awareness against racism”
For Bolema Bossio Wangi, father of Pengo, the national tribute which will be paid to the victims of Trappes, must be “the opportunity for real awareness and a commitment against racism”. “Coming from African immigration, I grew up in France in the 80s and 90s, a period when attacks against North Africans or blacks were unfortunately common. And I did not believe that several decades later, my son Pengo Bossio Wangi would succumb at the hand of an individual driven by the same hatred,” he lamented, via his daughter Ambre, during a press conference in Paris this Monday, November 2.
“Today, in a France plagued by strong identity tensions, I am afraid as the father of black children. But despite our anger and our pain, Pengo’s mother and I choose to trust the justice of this country,” he added. “We love this country for the values it carries and in which we deeply believe, such as fraternity,” he said, adding: “France must always remain faithful to its values, whatever the origins” and “the skin color of its inhabitants.”
