The mother-in-law of the Granby girl, who was convicted Thursday of second degree murder and forcible confinement, has already been charged with assaulting the child. The jury was not aware of this disturbing information, however, nor did the current trial come close to ending without a verdict.
In September 2017, while intoxicated, the mother-in-law pulled the 5-year-old girl by the hair and threw her to the ground. The child went to a convenience store on her own to ask for help.
Police visited the girl’s home and her mother-in-law was charged with aggravated assault. She pleaded guilty to the charges and was granted an absolute discharge. Police intervened two more times at the same address in 2017, but no charges were laid.
In 2017, a doctor also questioned whether the child was locked in her room, according to a court document that was not presented to the jury. The specialist was asking himself these questions, because the girl would have suffered from a perforation of the intestine and a swelling of the bladder, according to a request filed with the court to review its supervision by the Direction de la protection de la jeunesse (DPJ ).
The doctor pointed out that the girl was living “an underlying post-traumatic stress disorder linked to neglect or other unspecified trauma that she experienced”, according to a judgment of May 30, 2018 of the Chamber of Justice. youth. She was stunted in growth, education and overall development, he added.
Also, during the trial, it was not mentioned to the 14 jurors that the death of the girl had led to the Laurent Commission, on the rights of the children and the protection of the youth.
Motion for a stay of proceedings
What the jury also did not know was that the trial almost ended without a verdict, twice during the court process.
In a flash, the mother-in-law’s lawyers filed a motion for a stay of proceedings on November 25. They argued that the evidence provided by the Crown was “incomplete” and “spurious”.
Lawyer Me Alexandre Biron tried to convince Judge Louis Dionne that the Crown had known since August that it wanted to challenge the testimony of pathology consultant Anny Sauvageau. He claimed that prosecutors for the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions had failed to provide them with certain evidence in this regard, when required by law.
The judge heard arguments from both parties for an entire day before finally dismissing the motion.
Also, on the third day of the trial, Mr.e Biron opened the day by arguing that a media outlet had contempt of court by disclosing information that jurors did not know. The lawyer played, without the presence of the jury, an excerpt from an online radio program. The disputed remarks were made by a lawyer who was commenting on the case and not by a journalist.
“We didn’t need that,” Judge Louis Dionne dropped after listening to the show. “For some, publication bans and Code provisions are like it’s written on toilet paper,” he added, visibly angry.
The judge summoned the jurors, one by one, to make sure they had not listened to the radio show. No one had done so, so the trial resumed the next morning.
An end of life in hell
Hungry. Locked up. Tied up. The 24 witnesses in the trial of the Granby girl’s stepmother have revealed disturbing details about the hours leading up to the death of the 7-year-old. Return on the last hours of the victim in hell.
Sunday April 28, 2019
9 a.m.
A dull sound wakes the household. “She’s on a piece of furniture. She is trying to get out of her window, ”the girl’s half-brother said during his interview with the police. The then 14-year-old says “his sister” is tired of being in her bedroom. She complains that she wants to urinate and is hungry. Furniture is placed in front of the two windows of her room to prevent her from running away. The mother-in-law then finds herself at a meeting with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
10 a.m.
Two more noises echo from the girl’s room. ” I open the door. She is not there anymore. The window is open. I approach and she has the two windows here [sur les joues]. It is suspended in the void, ”continues the half-brother. During the trial, the teenager answers questions from lawyers by videoconference to avoid being in front of his mother, whom he has not seen since his arrest. He claims his sister urinated on her bedroom floor. He is served a “big” bowl of tofu and salad to satisfy his hunger, he says.
6 p.m.
The half-brother returns from a trip to the movies. He does not see his sister. “They told me she was in her room” and that she hadn’t been out all day, he says. Instead, the mother-in-law testified that the girl had dinner with her family, watched children’s movies in the afternoon, and ate beef cheeks for supper.
Monday, April 29, 2019
1 h 40
The doorbell of Richard Samson, a neighbor, rings in the middle of the night. ” I opened the door. I heard little noises, ”said Mr. Samson, during the trial. From her balcony, the accused shouted to her: “Ah, Richard! It is [la victime] who escaped from his room. I’ve been running after five minutes. Mr. Samson sees a man walking the “whining” girl back to her house. During his testimony, this neighbor recounts that the accused’s house is still lifeless. “The windows are all closed. The curtains all drawn. We don’t see the children. ”
2 hrs
The child is naked and in all its forms when entering the house, according to the accused. ” She’s crying. She says she is not going to do it again, that she wants to get out of her room, ”said the mother-in-law during her testimony. The woman installs an alarm system on the windows, then returns to watch a movie. But a piece of furniture is still moved in the little girl’s room. The child is then wrapped in adhesive tape, but the accused claims that it was not she who initiated the restraint. Before being tied up, the girl is dressed in an adult shirt, the sleeves tied at the back, like a straitjacket.
4 hrs
The girl is still moving. The child’s small legs are then placed in a pink toque to prevent the adhesive tape from sticking to his skin, explains the accused. The mother-in-law grabs the struggling child’s feet. The woman says she is participating in the restraint because she fears that the child will be injured while waiting for a child psychiatry appointment at 3 p.m. At the same time, the half-brother appears. He sees his sister. “Her legs and arms were tied. She was moving her head, ”he explains. The girl begs him: “Untie me, I promise that I will not run away,” he hears.
8 h
The mother-in-law is awakened by a noise. The girl is breaking away. “I just took the slap and I rolled around my chest, ”she says, in tears, during her testimony. “And I squeezed at his chest. “I can’t say the number of laps, maybe ten laps,” she continues. But the girl continues to hop. “I laid her down on the floor. In the other direction, I put two turns [de ruban adhésif] to prevent her from moving, ”she says in tears. “I spent the slap on his hair and I directed him to the feet. And I went back up. Once the child has been immobilized, the accused sends a text message to a certain “Casablanca”. “I tied it up correctly,” she wrote. The accused denies having covered the child’s mouth and nose.
Between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.
A cry of fear awakens the victim’s half-brother. It is her mother who has just discovered the inanimate girl. “My little sister, she had to scotch tape from head to toe, everywhere. Even on the mouth, even on the nose. She was covered with scotch tape », He reveals during his heartbreaking testimony. “It was a mummy. You didn’t see her through the slap. There were several layers. Not just one. Several, ”he adds. He is asked to dial 911, but he is paralyzed with fear. According to his version, he is ordered to hide the duct tape, which he refuses to do.
11:30 a.m.
“Quick, an ambulance. The little one, she’s not breathing. Nothing. She’s dead, “launches a voice in the first seconds of the 911 call.” She’s not breathing, but I don’t know for how long, “continues the panicked adult. Other distraught voices are heard in the recording of less than five minutes. Amélie Berville, the operator on 911, asks if the child’s trachea is blocked by food or vomit. “No, she ran out of air. I will explain this to you when you arrive, ”the interlocutor replied. He bursts into tears at the end of the call.
11:35 a.m.
Agent Martin Noël was the first to arrive on the scene. He was struck by the heat in the little girl’s room and by the arrangement of the furniture. The victim is naked and “rickety” in the middle of the room, he said during his testimony. She has marks on her legs, arms and lower abdomen. “I realize that the body is bathed in a liquid that looks like urine and vomit,” he explains. When the policeman begins resuscitation maneuvers, other “points are obvious to him”. There is a ball of tape and a pair of scissors near the child’s body. Her colleague Linda Harpin and paramedic Kariane Royer provide similar testimonies.
Midday
The little patient was transported to the Center hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke, where she was immediately taken to a “shock room”. Eight minutes after his arrival, the medical staff managed to resuscitate his heart, but the child was kept alive thanks to a ventilator. The girl weighs only 16.4 kg (36 pounds), which puts her in the 0 to 3 percentile. The next day, at 10:35 p.m., the doctors cannot help but unplug the girl.
Reactions
“Place the child at the center of decisions”
It is necessary to “place the child at the center of decisions” in order to avoid cases like those of the girl from Granby, argues Jacques Moreau, professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Montreal. In his opinion, the recommendation to prioritize the best interests of the child made by the report of the Laurent commission on children’s rights and youth protection came “20 or 30 years too late”. “We should have done that long before,” he emphasizes. If the bond developed with the child is important, it does not have to be of a biological nature, explains Mr. Moreau. “What matters is the human quality of the bond, the love given to the child, the care given, the affection, the recognition and the fact of helping him to build his person and his self-esteem”, says- he. But above all, stability is essential for the development of toddlers, concludes the professor.
Short deliberations
The few hours needed to reach a verdict allow us to presume that “the evidence was convincing for the jury,” says Denis Gallant, senior partner of Roy Bélanger Avocats. “The deliberation is generally longer,” he continues. We are talking about a week, two weeks or a few days. In his opinion, this shows good note-taking on the part of the jury. The latter would “not need to ask additional questions to the judge or to listen to passages of testimony again”, which takes more time, he explains.
Florence Morin-Martel, Press