Murder in Ormstown | A smiling woman appreciated by the neighborhood

A smiling, popular young woman who loved making snowmen with her daughter: this is the portrait painted, in shock, by the neighbors of Amanda Caza, stabbed Wednesday in her home, possibly by her father. Alain Caza was charged with second-degree murder on Thursday.

Incomprehension still reigns in Ormstown, a small village in Haut-Saint-Laurent, in Montérégie, the day after the death of Amanda Caza. As in many cases, the victim’s neighbors speak of a family without history, which had “nothing abnormal”.

However, agents of the Sûreté du Québec intervened in the morning on Wednesday after receiving a call for “an altercation between two people” at the home of M^me Caza. They found his lifeless body there and arrested his father on the spot.

Several people paid tribute to the young woman on her Facebook account on Thursday. “I can’t believe it was his last with her,” wrote one of her friends under a photo of the thirty-year-old and her daughter in a creamery. A wreath of flowers and a letter were also left at the door of his home.

Amanda Caza is number 13^e woman murdered in Quebec since the beginning of the year.

Total nothing

Amanda Caza lived on Cairns Street, a cul-de-sac at the entrance to the village, as there are dozens in this essentially rural region of Montérégie. “The worst thing we hear here is the lawnmowers,” explains Jacqueline Hainault-Roch, who lives at the end of the little lane. She doesn’t understand how this kind of drama could happen in the “usual calm” of Ormstown.

Steve de Repentigny resides just opposite the duplex where M^me Caza and her daughter occupied the upstairs apartment. The man confides that he was unable to sleep during the night from Wednesday to Thursday, kept awake by the flashing lights of the police cars and by the incomprehension of what could have led to the tragedy that occurred in front of his home. He describes his neighbor as a woman “liked by everyone” and “good with people”.

According to residents of Cairns Street, what happened around the young woman’s home was always ordinary. “She made snowmen with her daughter, and she decorated at Christmas and Halloween,” said Louise Allen, who lives a few houses away.

Her ex-boyfriend, the father of her daughter, came to the young woman’s house a few times a month, to pick up or leave the child, of whom he shared custody with her, depending on the neighborhood.

M^me Allen knew Alain Caza’s sister, in addition to having gone to high school with the latter, in the mid-1970s, proof of the size of this tight-knit community. She remembers a quiet man, who was “not a little bum”.

“We had lost touch since then, but I really didn’t expect to cross paths with him like that. »

If we ignore the final chapters of the relationship between Amanda Caza and her father, the victim’s Facebook page suggests that the two had a harmonious relationship at times.

“Happy Father’s Day to the best father in the world. My hero, my emergency contact, strong but kind and always able to make me laugh,” we can read, in English, in a publication by the young woman dated last June.

Appearing by videoconference Thursday morning at the Salaberry-de-Valleyfield courthouse, Alain Caza pleaded not guilty to one count of second-degree murder. “Yes,” he said twice when the judge asked him to confirm his identity and whether he understood French well. He will remain detained pending the next steps in his case.

With the collaboration of Vincent Larin, The Press