No real reason for graphic exposure
“What you’re about to see is very graphic.”
The warning on Tuesday morning came from Crown attorney Meghan Scott.
Delivered at the very minute that a dozen teenagers filed into the courtroom on one of those school field trips to see justice in action.
They appeared to endure the ordeal without visible trauma. But I kept thinking: Leave. Now. Go.
There are some things that should never be displayed in public.
And this — autopsy photos of the dismembered remains of 24-yearold Rigat Ghirmay — was the worst I’ve ever witnessed in decades of covering trials. Murder porn. I wondered, too: Would these exhibits — final violation of an Eritrean refugee chopped up into pieces, allegedly in her own bathtub — have been put up on a screen, in open court, if the victim was a young white middle-class female?
Because it is no longer routine for such grisly evidence to be paraded in court.
One person who didn’t look up at all: Adonay Zekarias, on trial for first-degree murder. He picked at his cuticles, stared into space, leaned in as a translator spoke quietly into his ear.
But he never cast a glance at those gruesome images.
Ghirmay’s remains were discovered at separate locations, three years apart. Her torso — actually, both legs from below the waist but with feet missing — were happened upon by a passerby, Francis McMullen, on May 24, 2013, stuffed into a duffel bag and left near a pathway in the Black Creek Flood control area. That spot was about 500 metres from Zekarias’s residence.
The second discovery was made by bone collector Michael Paquet on two expeditions a week apart to the Lavender Creek Trail in April 2016. The first cache was long leg bones and bone shards that Paquet originally believed were animal specimens. Returning to the site later he found a plastic bag that contained a clearly human skull, ribs and other bones — the rest of Ghirmay, apart from the feet and her right hand, which have never been found.
It was the torso — most of Ghirmay’s lower half, retrieved only nine days after the woman was last seen alive, so still fleshy and not extensively decomposed — that sent shudders through the courtroom as Dr. Toby Rose, a forensic pathologist, testified about the remains she had autopsied.
“This is the entire specimen,” Rose, deputy chief of forensic pa- thology with Ontario Forensic Pathology Service, said crisply, with the detachment of an expert who specializes in the dead, a corpse whisperer.
And there Ghirmay is on the screen, severed just above the belly button, still wearing yoga pants and her underwear, with a deep slash across one leg, as if someone had tried to saw through below the knee cap but not finished the job.
Bisecting a human being at the waist, noted Rose, is not particularly strenuous work. “There aren’t any bones there to go through . . . until you get to the spine.”
Oh, but it got excruciatingly more horrific. In another slide, the truncated body is now naked. So terribly vulnerable. Rose points out “splash marks” on the buttocks, indicating that some type of liquid had spread across the area. Yes, it might have been acid, it might have been bleach. But testing revealed no definitive cause. Just as Rose could not determine cause of death by what she had on the table. There were no obvious injuries such as a bullet hole or a stabbing wound. Ghirmay may have been strangled, who knows? Rose didn’t have a neck that could have shown compression injuries.
“It can be difficult to determine a cause of death even when I examine (a body) in the best of circumstances. In this case the circumstances are the worst.”
She did draw attention to a few “body part defects,” evidence of small injuries that she concluded occurred after death.
Of particular scrutiny to Rose during the autopsy was a tiny puncture to the external genitalia. And here we were presented with an excised scrap of flesh from the clitoris to the anus. It might have been significant as an indicator of sexual assault trauma but Rose could draw no conclusions. There were no internal injuries. Ghirmay had been a healthy young woman.
But we stared at the specimen anyway, in magnified dimensions, these most intimate details of a dead woman’s anatomy. With no discernible reason for why Ghirmay should have been so miserably exposed.
It was another pathologist who conducted the post-mortem on the “jumble” of bones found by Paquet, but Rose, who reviewed the findings, presented them to court. “Her circumstances were worse,” said Rose of her colleague. “She only had a skeleton.”
Those desiccated remains showed no “bony” injuries but there were some indications of “changes she saw in the bones” that could have been caused by an object with a blade, a straight edge and a pointed end. A knife in other words.
The prosecution’s theory is that Zekarias killed Ghirmay — a close friend who’d briefly shared an apartment with him — to prevent her from taking any suspicions she may have had to police about the Oct. 23, 2012, murder of another woman, Nighisti Semret. The mother of four, also a refugee from Eritrea — as is the accused — was stabbed to death in a Cabbagetown alley as she walked home after her night shift as a hotel maid.
It is unknown if Ghirmay and Semret knew each other. But both certainly knew Zekarias. Semret had helped Zekarias — they both lived for a time at Sojourn House, a refugee shelter — fill out immigration paperwork. All three came to Canada from Eritrea.
Zekarias was Semret’s killer. He was convicted of first-degree murder in June 2015 and sentenced to life in prison.
Although simultaneously charged with Ghirmay’s murder, the trials were severed. This trial, four years after Ghirmay was last seen alive — captured on surveillance video entering her Shuter St. apartment building with Zekarias — is judgealone, which is why so many details about the earlier crime have been heard in open court: How he fled to Germany for two months after the Semret slaying and monitored reports of the police investigation on his laptop searches; how he returned to Canada in February 2013 when detectives still believed they were looking for a white suspect who walked with a limp; and how, crucially, he’d been taken to hospital, mere hours after Semret was killed, to be treated for severe wounds to both hands, which he claimed had been caused by a slamming door.
DNA taken from beneath Semret’s fingernails led police to dramatically change their suspect description, revealing that the killer had probably absorbed serious injuries to his arms or hands during the assault, and also announcing a $50,000 reward for information resulting in an arrest.
Ghirmay had ridden in the ambulance with Zekarias. She was with him when he purchased his plane ticket to Germany. In the months prior to his arrest, they were frequently seen together, as Ghirmay bought a TV, a cellphone and signed a lease on a subsidized housing apartment.
No motive has ever been learned for why Semret was murdered.
But there was plenty of motive for silencing Ghirmay — a victim, in a final indignity, stripped of all her secrets in court. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.