The first investigator sergeant assigned to the disappearance of Norah, Romy and Martin Carpentier claims to have never heard before Tuesday of a statement raising the possibility that the father had kidnapped his two daughters, collected in the hours following their evaporation in the forest of Saint-Apollinaire.
In the hours that followed the swerve of the vehicle driven by Martin Carpentier at the height of Saint-Apollinaire, on July 8, 2020, two relatives had sounded discordant notes in the portrait of an exemplary father drawn up by the entourage of Martin Carpentier.
The investigator assigned to the case did not hear anything about it until the next morning, twelve hours after the disappearance of the father and his daughters.
The spouse at the time of Amélie Lemieux, the mother of Norah and Romy, was the first to raise the hypothesis that the father had been able to kidnap his daughters. He had told of the latter’s morbid fear of losing their guard and had asked for an Amber alert to be triggered.
Investigator Sergeant Kevin Camiré only learned of the existence of this statement on Tuesday, 952 days after the disappearance of the two girls, he said during the third day of hearings of the public inquiry. “It was when the Sûreté du Québec policeman mentioned it during his testimony that I found out,” said the sergeant-investigator in response to a question from lawyer Jean-François Leroux, representative of the mother and grandmother of the two missing children.
Investigator Sergeant Camiré landed at the scene of the accident around 3:10 a.m. on the night of July 9. “I got the topo around 3:30 a.m., he explained Wednesday afternoon. At that time, he said, “no one forwarded Mr. Pelletier’s statement to me. This declaration, I have never seen it. »
A close friend of the missing father, Keven Lemieux, had also explained, in the hours following the accident, that Martin Carpentier was showing signs of depression. He even said that he had asked the latter if he had suicidal thoughts just three weeks before the July 8 accident.
This information Sergeant Camiré never had either.
At 6:30 a.m. on July 9, the investigator-sergeant had already spoken to a dozen relatives and colleagues of Martin Carpentier, including his spouse and the mother of his children. Several indicated that the man had lost weight and been acting unsettled over the past few weeks. The maternal grandmother of the two sisters, Gaétane Tremblay, had mentioned at 6:24 a.m. to the sergeant-investigator that “it is not impossible that it was a voluntary gesture”, that Martin Carpentier could have provoked the accident and flee with his daughters.
The first conversation Sergeant Camiré recalls having about releasing the identities and photos of the three missing was with the captain in charge of the search only two hours later, shortly after 8:30 a.m.
“Between 8:45 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.” on July 9, according to the memories of the investigator-sergeant, Amélie Lemieux’s spouse at the time arrived at the home of the grandmother where Mr. Camiré is. “He was more incisive, said the sergeant-investigator. He said: [Martin] born feel not so much, I tell you. I am a special education teacher and he does not feel not so good. “The spouse again raises the urgency of triggering an Amber alert and even speaks on the phone with the superior of the sergeant-investigator, Annie Thériault, to explain his concerns to her.
The sergeant-investigator then asked the spouse if he wanted to record his testimony – to learn “with surprise” that the man had already delivered his statement, the day before, to the patrol officers present on the scene of the accident.
It was not until 3 p.m. on July 9 that the Sûreté du Québec finally issued the Amber alert.