Gérard Petit often lodged his friend Marcel Poirier, a 54-year-old homeless person, with him. Yet in 2019, during a night of drinking, he killed him by stabbing him eight times.
Posted at 4:18 p.m.
Petit was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Tuesday at the Montreal courthouse after pleading guilty to a charge of manslaughter.
“I regret this incident, I never thought that something like this could happen”, said the 65-year-old man, in tears, while he was in the box of the defendants in front of the judge Catherine Perreault .
“Marcel had become a friend, I had tried to get him out of the street, I would bring him home when it was too cold. ”
But on the night of July 28 to 29, 2019, the two men had an altercation, in Petit’s apartment, located in an HLM in Plateau-Mont-Royal. The accused says he wanted to get the victim out, who threatened to destroy everything in the apartment.
Marcel Poirier would then have grabbed a kitchen knife and found himself in the corridor, with Gérard Petit.
The accused therefore grasps the victim’s wrist, to turn the weapon towards the homeless person. He stabs him several times, but claims that Marcel Poirier keeps the knife in his hand.
At this time, Gérard Petit “has the impression that he is the victim,” he said to the police during questioning.
The statement of facts presented Tuesday in court notes, however, that Marcel Poirier received a blow in the back and another behind the thigh, which Petit could not explain.
“I had no intention of killing this person. There is not an evening that I do not think about it ”, argued the accused, before receiving his sentence.
A blood test revealed that the victim had consumed alcohol, cannabis and clonazepam, a drug used in particular to combat anxiety. According to Gérard Petit, Marcel Poirier often consumed drugs that he found in the trash. “There are not enough services for the homeless,” said Petit.
The 11-year prison sentence imposed on the accused was a joint suggestion by Crown and defense lawyers, which was endorsed by the judge.
Judge Catherine Perreault explained that this sentence took into account the circumstances of the crime, but also the violence of the attack.
As Gérard Petit had been imprisoned since the events, the time already spent behind bars reduces the length of his sentence; He therefore has a little over seven years to serve.