At the origin of this sad affair, a little girl, very thin, barely seven years old, found unconscious on the floor of her room on April 29, 2019.
A call to 911. Police officers and paramedics arriving as a matter of urgency in a single-family house in a neighborhood a little away from the center of the city of Granby.
And this intuition of policewoman Linda Harpin who turns this call for help into a crime scene. She begins to photograph the girl’s room: “We weren’t in a normal situation. We had just fallen into a criminal investigation, ”she told the 14 jurors and Judge Louis Dionne of the Superior Court who presided over the trial.
The places are quickly delimited by yellow tape, and the investigators then take over. Charges are filed against the stepmother of the girl: sequestration, because of the adhesive paper suspected of having surrounded the girl shortly before the arrival of the police, and second degree murder, that is to say murder not premeditated. The accused pleaded not guilty and has been in prison since her arrest.
Two and a half years later, the criminal trial of the child’s mother-in-law began at the Trois-Rivières courthouse on October 18.
The 38-year-old looks younger than her age, with her chubby face and long dark hair. Small in size, wearing a black jacket and a white shirt in court, she expressed herself in neat French.
The trial now seems to be drawing to a close: around 20 witnesses have been called by the Crown and two by the defense, including the accused herself, who was not obliged to testify. The trial is currently suspended for a week; it is expected to continue towards the end of next week. The defense has not yet declared its case closed and it can still call other people to testify.
Where was the duct tape?
The Crown contends that the accused wrapped the girl in transparent tape, the type that is used to seal large moving boxes. According to his theory of the cause, this caused the death of the girl, who could no longer breathe. He was pronounced dead in hospital the next day, April 30, 2019.
The onus is on the Crown to prove all elements of the crimes charged “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
To establish the presence of duct tape on the girl’s body, the Crown called the police and paramedics to testify. They reported seeing a pile of sticky paper on the floor near the girl’s body, which was described as a “shell” and “bulging shape”. This pile, treasured by the police, was shown to the jury.
The accused herself admitted to having put duct tape – twice – on the girl to immobilize her. The first time around the torso and the second vertically, starting from the head to the feet. Except that she indicated to have “added”, because there were already some when she did so, she said. In the morning, according to her version, there was some on the child’s face, but it is categorical: it was not she who affixed it to this place.
It should be noted that publication bans ordered by the court prevent journalists from revealing the identity of the accused and that of other people involved in this case. Some testimonies cannot be reported either.
The jurors also viewed the statements made to the police on the very day of the tragedy by the two other children of the household. The oldest, a 14-year-old teenager who is the son of the accused, said the girl was completely wrapped in tape from head to toe “like a mummy”. As for the victim’s little brother, who was only 5 years old when he answered the police officers’ questions, he had this sentence about ” tape “:” There were plenty. “
Why ?
The accused explained that the girl had been immobilized with duct tape that day because she had made several attempts to run away the night before. She had managed to run away around 1.30 am: she had gone out of her bedroom window, completely naked, and had crossed the street to go ring the bell at a neighbor’s house.
The photos shown to the jury show that the furniture in his room had been stacked against the wall so as to block the window. Despite this, the girl tried to reach him again, said the defendant; she was therefore afraid that a piece of furniture would crush her by falling on her or that the girl would make another attempt to run away from the window and be injured by jumping outside.
Distraught, short of means, the mother-in-law then thought that tie it with ribbon was the “only solution” while waiting for an appointment with the child psychiatrist, scheduled for the same day at 3 pm. “I didn’t know what to do anymore,” said the woman, who says she hasn’t slept overnight.
In front of the jury, she says she never intended to hurt the child – and certainly not to kill her: “At that time, I never thought it was dangerous. [de mettre du ruban]. I never thought she was going to die, ”the woman said sobbing.
She also told that the child had extremely difficult behaviors, that she had serious crises, that she shouted “for hours”, urinated in her drawers and on her soft toys, gorged herself on food, stole the lunches of the children. other children at school, and even “self-harm”. The girl had even been kicked out of school not long before, she said.
The crux of the matter
How, and from what, did the child die? The jury will have to decide on this delicate question which is potentially fraught with consequences for the accused.
Jurors were able to count on the report of forensic pathologist Caroline Tanguay to help them. This doctor performed the autopsy, but could not determine the cause of death by examining the child’s small body: no disease, no trauma, no injury, no drugs in his blood.
In short, faced with such a result, the DD Tanguay explained that the rules of the trade want the pathologist to then turn to the circumstances of the case and proceed by elimination to pinpoint the cause of death. Here, she had received these two pieces of information that gave her the context: the tape on her nose and mouth and the one on her chest.
Because tape over the nose and mouth will cause death much faster than any amount of tape around the torso, she concluded it this way: death “by external suffocation”, taking for granted that the airways were blocked. If not, she agrees that the other most likely cause is that the tape compressed her torso and eventually prevented her body from making the required back-and-forth motion. to breathe.
The pathologist also touched on another subject in her testimony: she told the jury that she was struck by the little stature of the girl. She weighed only 16.4 kg (36 pounds) and was only 1.02 meters when she died, which is very low on the growth charts for a child her age. “Her weight loss is significant,” she said. The first police officer to arrive on the scene, on the morning of April 29, said he saw the naked body of a rickety girl – which reminded him of starving children in Ethiopia.