The alleged murder of a 43-year-old woman by a man in his 30s on Sunday evening in Sorel-Tracy, Montérégie, continues to rock the neighborhood of the “quiet” and tightly knit residential area, as investigators work to uncover clarify certain gray areas surrounding the circumstances of this tragedy.
Audrey-Sabrina Gratton, a mother, had lived for several years in a two-storey house with a few rental units on Turcotte Street, near a park with several children’s games, among green residential streets. In this sector, calm reigns, interrupted briefly by the passage of cars. They were numerous, Tuesday afternoon, to slow down in front of the security perimeter set up in front of the scene of the murder and lifted around 2:30 p.m. by the police officer of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) present on the spot. He then left the scene.
The investigation is continuing, however, since several gray areas remain to be clarified and the death of Mme Gratton is considered suspicious. Late Sunday evening, officers arrested a 34-year-old suspect who attempted to flee the rental unit, where a fire had been declared, prompting the arrival of firefighters and law enforcement, who found the woman dead. victim, whose body was charred by the flames.
A “shaken” community
Since then, a bouquet of flowers has been placed at the foot of a tree in front of the rental building where the body of Audrey-Sabrina Gratton was found. The victim is survived by his daughter, both parents and many loved ones. Her disappearance has severely affected the residential area, where several residents on Tuesday expressed the great generosity of the deceased woman.
“We are quite shaken,” said a resident of Turcotte Street, who remembers hearing a cry of horror as she was getting ready to go to bed on Sunday night. The lady was not close to the victim, but in Sorel-Tracy, a town of around 35,000 inhabitants, “we know each other quite a bit,” she says. “Everyone knows someone who is connected to the event,” illustrates this neighbor, who herself studied at the same high school as Audrey-Sabrina Gratton, in Sorel-Tracy.
“It’s a human drama and when we’re close, we experience things more than when it’s happening in another city,” adds the lady in her forties, who preferred to keep her name silent. She remarks that the victim “did not disturb the neighborhood at all”. On the contrary, she often brought “surprises to the children”. His death thus has the effect of a “shock wave” in this district, she illustrates. “It will take time to assimilate all that. »
Kim Rivard, the victim’s immediate neighbor, still had a tight throat with emotion when The duty met her outside her house on Tuesday. She only had good words for Audrey-Sabrina Gratton, whom she described as a person with a big heart. “I saw her often. She was very nice to my children. My children are just sad,” she sighs. The victim had also “came to see [son] new dog” just five days ago, she adds.
Mme Rivard said he was surprised that such a tragic event had occurred in an area as calm as his.
“It’s really quiet here. Nothing happens. And it’s the fun when nothing is happening. You don’t realize it until something happens,” she blurts out.
Joined in the early evening par Le Devoir, the father of the victim, Jacques Gratton, was stingy with comments so as not to harm the ongoing police investigation. “I live very, very badly,” he said of his daughter’s death.
“It looks like a bad movie starting again, a different and really horrible one,” wrote the victim’s daughter, Trinity Gratton-Thériault, on social media on Monday evening. Last year, his father had died in an all-terrain vehicle accident. Now she is an orphan. “You taught me everything: cooking, how to screw my first screws, not to let me step on my toes and you have always been behind me against the whole world,” she added on her Facebook page. “It breaks my heart what happened, it’s a bad nightmare. »
Shadow areas
Police must now wait until the suspect in the case, who was “very seriously injured” by the fire, is able to give evidence, the newspaper said. To have to, Tuesday, Sergeant Audrey-Anne Bilodeau, spokesperson for the SQ. An autopsy must also be carried out soon by the coroner’s office on the victim, which should help to clarify the circumstances of M’s death.me Graton. We will only know then if this one was the sixth victim of a feminicide in Quebec since the beginning of the year.
Several media have also reported that the suspect is one of the lady’s ex-spouses. The duty however, has not been able to validate this information with relatives and the SQ, which indicates for its part that it has not confirmed the link which united these two people. The police force could not, moreover, indicate whether weapons were found at the scene of the murder.