A 21-year-old man from Marseille, France, who was found guilty of murdering a 70-year-old gay man in 2023, was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison, followed by five years of probation.

The accused said that he wanted to “rid the planet of a disgusting pedophile,” Libération reports.

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The victim met the defendant on an anonymous chat app, and they met up in August 2023 for paid sex. The defendant was 18 at the time. Three days later, the defendant and his little brother, age 14, went to the victim’s house and stabbed him multiple times.

They then slit his throat and left his body in the bathtub. The medical examiner noted that the victim was “quasi decapitated.”

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The brothers stole the victim’s phone, keys, and money before fleeing the scene.

The older brother’s trial focused largely on his motive. His lawyer argued that the killing was a robbery gone wrong, as shown by the fact that the defendants robbed the victim.

But prosecutors insisted that it was a hate crime, arguing that the defendant “admitted his actions” and “presented himself as a sort of vigilante fighting society’s decadence who decides whether a man he suspected of pedophilia has a right to live or die. But justice is served in courts.”

During the criminal investigation, the 25-year-old defendant said that he had a “desire to know what it’s like to take someone’s life,” and they had several of his former teachers testify about his obsession with guns and drawings of scenes of decapitation.

Libération reports that the court debated the homophobia the brothers grew up with in their home, which may have prevented the older brother from accepting his own sexuality. They also brought in a psychiatrist who said that the older brother is likely on the autistic spectrum and was, therefore, isolated and had trouble reading other people’s emotions.

Prosecutors asked for 30 years in prison for the older brother, stressing that he presented a great “risk of recidivism,” but got 25. The defendants’ lawyers argue that they were satisfied with the jury’s sentencing: “They went beyond the horror of the crime and understood the exceptional circumstances that plunged an 18-year-old child with no prior convictions into such horror.”

The younger brother was sentenced to 15 years in prison in May 2025, getting a lighter sentence than his older brother because he was a minor.

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