(Trois-Rivières) The long-awaited trial of the mother-in-law of the girl from Granby opened on Monday, in Trois-Rivières, with the listening of a call to 911 and the testimony of a police officer who intervened first at the crime scene on the morning of April 29, 2019. The woman is charged with unpremeditated murder and forcible confinement of the seven-year-old. She pleaded not guilty.
“Quickly an ambulance. [La] little one doesn’t breathe anymore. Nothing. She’s dead, ”says the person who dialed 911 in the first few seconds of the call. The recording, which was shown to the 14 jurors, lets other panicked voices be heard in the background. In the box of the accused, the mother-in-law of the child shed tears listening to the call.
“Is there any food or vomit?” », Asked the operator during the call which lasts less than five minutes. “No, she ran out of air. I’ll explain that to you when you get there, ”replies the person who bursts into tears shortly after.
Agent Martin Noël, the first police officer to arrive on the scene, then came to tell the jury what he saw when he entered the house in Granby. In the kitchen, a woman and a child told him that the girl in distress was in a room at the end of a hallway. “I enter the room. We feel a wall of heat. It’s palpable. The temperature is high, ”he said.
The girl, completely naked, is then stretched out on the ground, according to the police officer. She was inanimate and the agent then began resuscitation maneuvers. “I realize that the body is bathed in a liquid which appears to be urine or vomit,” he explained to the court.
“The furniture was not installed in a standard way. There was no bed. The furniture was stacked in front of the window so that there was nothing on the floor, ”he notes.
The policeman referred to the child’s body as being “rickety”. The girl had marks on her legs, arms and near her thumb, he said. He found scissors and duct tape, in a ball, near the victim. Doctors found him dead the next day in hospital.
The officer will continue his testimony during cross-examination of defense lawyers on Monday afternoon. In the next six to eight weeks, around 20 witnesses will be called to testify in this trial. Calls and texts from the accused will also be presented in evidence.
A publication ban prevents us from identifying certain witnesses and elements of this trial.