They had come to demonstrate their anger, in a festive spirit. But the occupation of a motorway near Pamiers in France's southwestern Ariège region ended in tragedy. On the afternoon of Monday, January 22, around a hundred farmers from the region decided to occupy and block the main road leading from Toulouse to Andorra. However, at 5:45 am on Tuesday morning, a car crashed into a family sheltering under a large tent set up next to the straw bales, blocking the road. The local public prosecutor, Olivier Mouysset, provided preliminary information suggesting the vehicle "collided with a wall of straw bales in the middle of the night, when there was no public lighting nearby. After mowing down three people, the vehicle finished its trajectory by crashing into a tractor trailer."

Alexandra Sonac, 35, died instantly. Her 40-year-old husband Jean-Michel was seriously injured, and their 12-year-old daughter died early on Tuesday evening. A man and two women of Armenian descent were the three occupants of the car, according to the prosecutor. They have been taken into custody as part of an investigation into aggravated manslaughter and aggravated injuries.

By late morning under the occupied bridge near the accident site, law enforcement and security forces blocked off a security perimeter. In shock, most of the demonstrators kept the press at a distance before leaving in silence after the tractors left.

Jean-Yves Bousquet, a local farmer and vice president of the department's chamber of agriculture, had left the blockade the evening before, "when the atmosphere was warm and friendly." According to him, "around 150 demonstrators were present in the evening and around 50 of them stayed on the site to sleep, under a large tent." Bousquet said, "This moment of sharing turned into a tragedy. We still have to stand together, even amid this new and terrible ordeal."

At an afternoon gathering in the hamlet of Pujols, a few kilometers from the scene of the tragedy, agricultural leaders and elected representatives from the Ariège region came to pay tribute to Sonac, who had been raising cows with her husband since 2016, in the commune of Saint-Felix-de-Tournegat.

A deeply moved Sébastien Durand, the commune's mayor and vice president of the National Federation of Agricultural Holders' Unions (FDSEA), said, "I organized the rally with Alexandra's husband Jean-Michel (...) This is a tragic loss for a family deeply involved in agriculture." Clémence Biard, president of the local branch of the Jeunes Agriculteurs ("Young Farmers") union, recalled having "shared the same benches [as Sonac] in high school, before she joined the union, convinced that our struggles were well-founded."

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