When she was found unconscious on the floor of her bedroom, the “Granby girl” had adhesive tape all over her body: “from head to toe”, including on her face and mouth, she said. it was related Tuesday to the criminal trial of the mother-in-law of the child.
It is the son of the accused who thus described the scene to the police, during two video statements that they recorded the same day.
The youngster, whose identity cannot be revealed, was only 14 years old at the time. He was present in the family home in Granby on the morning of April 29, 2019.
He recounted the drama that took place there. Running from the basement to the main floor, he saw the interior of the 7-year-old girl’s bedroom, and her body completely covered with transparent tape. “Everywhere, everywhere, even on the mouth. “
“I saw that we were in the process of removing the scotch tape of his face ”.
Initially, the youngster reported, in the first statement recorded by the police, that the little girl only had tape on her arms and legs, and that it was not tight. “You could pass two fingers. “
The Crown intends to demonstrate that the 38-year-old accused kidnapped the girl by wrapping her in duct tape, and that she subsequently died. A pile of sticky paper had been found near the girl’s body.
But after finishing this first statement, and waiting a bit in a room, he told the DPJ worker who accompanied him to the station that he wanted to talk to the police again.
In front of them, the boy with the soft eyes told them: “there is a very, very important information that I had not said”, so as not to harm anyone, he explained.
Publication bans prevent journalists from reporting whole or parts of testimony. The identities of some of the people involved in this drama cannot be disclosed either.
While the jurors watched the two videos from 2019 on Tuesday morning, they could also see the teenager, present in a court room adjacent to theirs, at the Trois-Rivières courthouse, where his mother’s trial is taking place. The latter, accused of murder and kidnapping, listens to her son from the accused’s box in the courtroom, chaired by Judge Louis Dionne of the Superior Court.
The teenager is now 16 years old. In both video recordings, she is heard describing the 7-year-old as “a really special little girl”, but “not in a good way”. She has been reported to not listen to teachers, have tantrums, “hit friends” and steal other students’ lunch boxes to eat their contents. She is also, according to him, “dependent” on food: “that’s all that matters to her in life”.
“She uses all her intelligence, but to do harm,” even dropped the 14-year-old in front of the police.
The day before April 29, 2019, she tried to escape on several occasions, he reported, and once managed to get out of her home, naked, in the middle of the night, through her bedroom window. A story partially confirmed by a neighbor who has already testified at the accused’s trial.
The girl would then have said that she was “tired of being in her room”, no longer wanting to be “in this family” and also that she was hungry.
Locked in her room, she peed there and once the door was opened for her, she ran into the kitchen to get some cookies, the young boy said. He often heard in the house that she was “stealing food from the family.”
After her last attempt to leave her room, when she was found with her head trapped in the window and bleeding, the girl’s arms and legs were tied with sticky paper, he told police officers, in a voice whose flow has become much faster.
The woman’s trial began on October 19 and continues on Tuesday.