Ti-Lilly. It is the name that Régine Laurent gave to the one that the law prevents us from naming, and that we called “the girl from Granby”.
A murder. This is what it was about. It was officially named Thursday by a jury.
If the death of this 7-year-old child so stirred Quebec, it is not only because she was martyred. This is because we collectively bear a share of guilt or, say, responsibility.
When a little girl is spotted almost at birth by youth protection, when these protection services put her in incompetent and dangerous hands, when she is so badly that she is expelled from school at 7 years old, her death at the end of all those howling alarm systems is no longer a private tragedy.
It is a collective bankruptcy, a national tragedy.
This child was supposed to be under the benevolent tutelage of the State, of the “system”, therefore of what “we” have installed so that she escapes violence and neglect.
This does not mean, however, to cancel individual responsibilities. Criminal.
If this jury returned their murder verdict in half a day – a sort of record – it is because there was no doubt.
It is often mistakenly believed that murder is simply the act of willfully killing a human being.
It is also doing something illegal when you know that it can kill someone. Even if the goal is not to kill this person.
Tie a 7 year old child with tape to prevent her from moving, cover her head with it: you don’t need a medical class to guess what it can do.
Even though “another person” had started the work of confinement to immobilize this poor girl, the accused admitted to having added slap. A lot of slap.
One of her own children, a now 16-year-old teenager, said her sister was like a mummy under this adhesive plastic sarcophagus.
The defense expert herself admitted that this criminal way of tying her up in her bedroom resulted in the child’s death.
The mother-in-law may not have wanted to kill Ti-Lilly from the start. But she knew very well, or should have known, that “it” could suffocate her. And she did it anyway.
It’s called murder.
So I do not accept the idea that this woman is a “scapegoat”.
She’s guilty, even though she “didn’t want that”, even though she lives in perpetual remorse, even though she says “I love her”, even though she wants to show her photos on her phone.
Still. It all hurts.
This is why, as Régine Laurent admitted, I too often changed TV channel, radio station or newspaper page when it came to “that”.
PHOTO GRAHAM HUGHES, ARCHIVES THE CANADIAN PRESS
Régine Laurent, President of the Special Commission on the Rights of Children and Youth Protection, during the tabling of her report, on May 3
The investigations have shown in detail how, whenever possible, feasible, necessary… it has not been protected.
Our bankruptcy is to have left this little girl in a well-identified and well-documented dangerous place.
“Each child who dies leaves a scar in the heart,” Régine Laurent wrote in the preamble to his commission’s report. Your death left a deep furrow in the heart of society. ”
This commission of inquiry, a sort of major update of the youth protection system, was not born only from this death. It was born from the observation that the neglect of social services has reached an unbearable level in Quebec. That this human catastrophe is not just a sad anecdote; it is a sign of general neglect.
All kinds of well-crafted recommendations have been put forward. Minister Lionel Carmant has shown his determination to update the protection of children in Quebec.
But now that criminal liability has been established, it remains to be seen whether the great collective emotion that has engulfed us will have lasting effects.
Or if the kind of collective sleep that allowed this death will return, and so many other dramas already forgotten, never named, undifferentiated.