A 47-year-old Laval resident who threw his roommate’s newborn in the trash was found guilty on all counts Tuesday. The judge did not believe a word of the defendant’s account of simply “cleaning” the bathroom following a miscarriage.
“Children are the most vulnerable beings in our society,” recalled Judge Serge Cimon at the start of his judgment Tuesday at the Laval courthouse.
The 47-year-old man – who cannot be identified – was neither accused of having killed a child nor of indignity to a corpse. He was rather targeted by the extremely rare charge of “deletion of part”, which implies having “made the corpse of a child disappear with the intention of hiding the fact that his mother gave birth to him”. This extraordinary trial took place last October.
Hiding the birth of this woman is exactly what the man did on August 10, 2020, according to the judge. To make matters worse, the baby was alive at the time of delivery. He was born at around 31 weeks. The cause of death is undetermined, but could result from lack of care at birth, according to an expert.
The accused shared his apartment with his ex-partner on Boulevard du Souvenir in Laval-des-Rapides. They remained roommates to raise their two children. The woman used alcohol and drugs. On the fateful day, she gave birth in the toilet. No one called emergency services to treat the woman and child.
Instead, the man put the baby in a garbage bag, which he filled with soiled towels. He then inserted the bag into a kitty litter box. And around 7 a.m., he went incognito to the building’s dumpster to put the box in the back corner. However, citizens discovered the body.
This way of getting rid of the child allows the judge to conclude that the man wanted to hide the fact that the mother had given birth. Furthermore, even though the mother had a stomach ache after giving birth, the man did not call for help. He even kept his routine, then went to work as if “nothing had happened”.
However, the man claimed to be in a state of “extreme fatigue” at that time and therefore to have acted mechanically. He said he woke up to the cries of the woman complaining of stomach aches. In a very implausible story, the man claimed to not even know that a baby was in the toilet bowl when he put his hand in it.
“I hit something hard. […] When I lifted it, it stayed the same fret. I reacted badly. It didn’t move, I put it in the box. I put it in the bag, closed it. I rolled up the bag,” he said. In her eyes, the child was dead and it was a miscarriage.
However, the accused knew “perfectly what a premature baby looks like since his son was born at 28 weeks,” said the judge. The baby was 15 inches tall and weighed three pounds.
Judge Cimon thus noted around twenty contradictions in the man’s story, who continued to contradict himself during the cross-examination conducted by Crown prosecutor M.e Claudia Ossio.
Why did the man act like this? The evidence doesn’t say so. Defense lawyer Me Moulay-Badre Aber had also argued at trial that the accused had nothing to gain from acting in this way since he was not the father of the child. The parentage between the accused and the baby was, however, of no importance, according to the judge.
Sentencing submissions will take place in the coming weeks. The maximum sentence is two years in prison.
The mother is still awaiting trial. She faces charges of “removal of share” and “neglect to obtain assistance during the birth of a child”. This charge – rarely seen – targets a woman who “neglected to make arrangements for reasonable assistance during her delivery, thereby causing the death of the child”.