Deka pleads guilty to murdering spouse
Before he stabbed Christa-Andrée Georges 32 times, Mario Deka terrorized her for months, taping her mouth closed, tying her to chairs and breaking her cellphone in an attempt to isolate her from friends and family.
On Wednesday, as Georges’s father sobbed openly in Quebec Superior Court, Deka pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 14 years.
Friends and family attending the court hearing expressed sadness that the 33-year-old Georges had fallen into the grasp of an abusive, controlling relationship, especially since she had first-hand experience working in battered women’s shelters.
When the child the couple had together was about 14 months old, Georges told Deka she wanted out of the relationship. In a rage, he stabbed her at their home last Oct. 16, then called 911.
The youngest of seven children was guided in her teenage years by members of Montreal’s Coloured Women’s Club, said Antonia Sealy, who said she was a mentor for the young Georges, whose mother was absent from her life.
“She was abused economically, physically and emotionally,” she said after Superior Court Justice Marc David sentenced Deka, 50. “He was very controlling and I knew it and she knew it.”
Georges graduated in nursing and women’s studies from John Abbott College, then went on to earn her nursing degree via distance learning from the University of Ottawa while working full time at the Montreal General Hospital.
She became more and more isolated from friends and family after meeting Deka a couple of years ago, Sealy said.
“She was thinking of buying the house across from me in Dollard-des-Ormeaux but he kept trying to take her further east until they ended up in Rivière des Prairies,” Sealy said. “After the baby, it was even worse because she was all alone.”
Sealy said she declined an invitation from Georges to go to the couple’s house on Thanksgiving because, she said, Deka didn’t make anyone feel welcome in their home. The following Wednesday, Georges was killed.
Deka, a former security guard at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport, has several children with other women, court was told Wednesday.
A scholarship has been created in Georges’s name at John Abbott College.