Aggression and pride fuelled teen’s stabbing, jury told

With the mother of the accused and the father of the victim on opposite sides of the courtroom, a jury heard Tuesday how a Halloween party on peaceable Nuns’ Island quickly turned into a scene of horror, with a 15-year-old bleeding to death on the sidewalk.

The teenager who has admitted to stabbing the victim that night is now on trial for second-degree murder. He was 16 at the time of the incident in October 2016.

But as the first day of the trial got underway and the accused pleaded not guilty, it wasn’t clear exactly how it happened — or why.

Crown prosecutor Anne-Claire Perron told the jury in her opening statement that this is not a story about youths with troubled pasts. Nor does it involve street gangs or drug deals gone bad.

“It’s about teenagers carried away by pride, aggression, impatience,” Perron said, “but mostly about the accused’s bad decision to take the knife offered to him by a friend and to use it.”

Perron then provided a chronology of events on the night of Oct. 28, 2016, and a description of the main characters, none of whom can be named because they were all minors at the time, and still are.

Several of them are expected to testify — in between their end-ofyear exams — some of them friends of the victim, others friends of the accused. They include the girlfriend of the victim, who brought the accused to the party; the best friend of the accused, “who prevented the worst from happening,” the Crown prosecutor said, without elaborating; his best friend, who brought the knife; and the victim’s best friends.

“It all happened very quickly,” Perron said. “It’s teenagers at a party. It’s complicated.”

But there was no conflict between the two prior to the party, Perron continued. In fact, it was the girlfriend of the victim who brought the accused to the party, held at the Elgar Community Centre.

The court heard how a man acting as the doorman told one of the friends of the accused to leave. He told them there were too many people at the party and he didn’t have tickets. (No one has yet managed to identify the doorman.)

There was then some sort of alter cation between the accused and the victim’s girlfriend, and at one point he hit her on the head. The accused left the party. But the victim and his friends soon went after him. One of them punched the accused, and he ran off. As they caught up to him again on foot, the accused turned around and stabbed the victim in the chest. The victim fell to the ground and was declared dead at the Montreal Children’s Hospital about two hours later.

Before the first witness was brought in on Tuesday, the judge reviewed all the points that had been admitted by the two sides: The victim was 15 and weighed about 116 pounds (53 kilograms). The accused weighed about 150 pounds (68 kg ). The victim had not consumed drugs or alcohol. The knife that had been used was found at the bottom of a stairwell, stained with the victim’s blood.

The first witness, a police officer, then produced photos of the weapon and the clothes of the victim, both covered in blood, as well as photos and video of the crime scene, with red stains on the sidewalk and on a low wall next to a park where the victim was found and taken to hospital.

The knife, found behind an apartment building some distance from the scene of the stabbing, had no fingerprints on it, Steve Robitaille testified.

The trial, which is set to last five weeks, continues Wednesday with testimony by the victim’s girlfriend.