Thursday, reading my Pressstill groggy from a restorative night’s sleep, I suddenly felt an impossible burst of energy: I wondered if someone had slipped Red Bull into my coffee.
Or napalm.
I quickly discovered the cause of this shock: it was the news I was reading at that precise moment.1the one on the father of the “girl from Granby” who pleads for her parole after… a little more than a year in prison.
The father (who cannot be identified under child protection laws that protect the identity of his late daughter) behaved exemplarily in prison. He was sentenced to four years in prison in January 2022 after pleading guilty to a reduced charge of forcible confinement.
For starving, beating, kidnapping and (ultimately) wrapping his daughter in a sarcophagus of tape with the enthusiastic assistance of his wife (which led to her death), guess what the father pleads today before the Commission parole to explain his participation in the spiral of brutality that led to the murder of his daughter?
Hold on tight: “I haven’t thought about it. »
This guy has always been a real scoundrel. He is there, contrite, in front of the commissioners, posing as a reformed man. He works on him. He learned. Get me some kleenex, I’m going to cry…
The mother of the torturer father is opposed to her son being released so soon.
Can we listen to her, the grandmother?
For once, I mean?
We are going to recap for those who have forgotten some crucial details of the saga of the little girl from Granby in order to understand how the system helped the father to continue to take bad care of his daughter, with dramatic consequences.
The baby was born to unfit parents2. Pregnant, her biological mother was spanking on her own belly. Slightly intellectually disabled, weighed down by serious mental health problems, consumption: she lost custody of her daughter at birth…
For the baby to be entrusted to his father.
Another fine specimen of incapacity, still frozen. And who – hold on tight, again! – refused to get up at night when the baby was hungry. Her reasoning: she will have to learn that the night is for sleeping.
It was the father’s mother who made a report to the DPJ. She will inherit the little one, under temporary placements of six months, renewable. From 2012 to 2015, the child will live with his grandmother.
At her grandmother’s, the little one was well. She lived in a structured home. She was loved. It “worked” well. There was no reason to uproot her to get her out of there.
The system has found a reason: the Youth Protection Act affirmed the primacy of blood ties. Result: the system gave every chance to parents, even the most unfit, to redeem themselves. Even trash like the father of the little girl from Granby.
The father initiated proceedings to regain custody of his daughter. He posed as a reformed man. He had worked on him. He had learned…
I will summarize the bias of the system towards him: every little effort was welcomed by the workers of the DPJ and by the judges as an incredible achievement. It’s just if these people did not wave to congratulate the father when he took a shower.
A worker was even moved by the fact that the father had stopped using dope for… three weeks!
For the grandmother, it was just the opposite. The system treated her objections to the return of the father she knew so well to her granddaughter’s life as an utterly incomprehensible display of paranoid malice at her reformed son.
I quote a speaker who pleaded for the child to be taken from her loving environment to be transplanted into another environment, an environment that was going to kill her: Madame’s alarm system is failing, she sees dangers everywhere…
We didn’t listen to her, the grandmother. And the little girl died of it.
And for his role in the death of his own daughter, the father got away with it – because he pleaded guilty to VERY reduced charges – with four years in prison, with only four years in prison…
And he has the right to ask for parole after a year and a little, presenting himself as a changed, reformed man.
Will he have it, his liberation? Response in two weeks.
But I remember that he already played this role not ten years ago, that of the guy who is no longer the drain he was, at the Youth Court. It had worked wonderfully: we understand why putting on the costume of the contrite man who learned from his mistakes in front of the parole board members…
Whether or not he’s released in two weeks, think about it: four years in prison for playing a central role in his daughter’s death. Just four years. Seems to me that the system makes some very sinister calculations that sometimes erase the value of the lives taken.