Victim’s wife tells court she found body on kitchen floor
Accused who has twice been convicted of murder was granted a third trial
At the start of an accused killer’s third trial, the victim’s wife told court Monday how she and her young daughter found the body of her husband who had been stabbed to death in their home.
Rima Nassereddine said she was returning to their southwest Calgary townhouse from work on March 17, 2010, with her six-yearold daughter, who immediately went to play with friends.
When the woman went into the home, she found the body of her 64-year-old husband, naked from the waist down on the kitchen floor near the back door.
“I took one step and called him, he didn’t answer,” said Nassereddine through an Arabic interpreter, adding she then summoned her daughter who came inside.
“She started calling, ‘Daddy, daddy,’ and he didn’t answer her. I started screaming; my whole body was shaking.”
She told the second-degree murder trial of Calgarian Crystal Crowchild that she then covered up her husband’s genitals with her daughter’s jacket.
The accused has been convicted twice of the murder of her husband — Aref Nassereddine.
Crowchild was granted a third trial in April 2017 after a Crown prosecutor told an appeal court panel that Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Ged Hawco had erred in instructing a jury in the 2016 proceedings.
Earlier, Crown prosecutor Rosalind Greenwood said Crowchild had met Nassereddine in the downtown East Village and she agreed to go to his home for sex, for which she’d be paid $60.
His wife was at work and daughter in school at the time.
After having intercourse on the Nassereddines’ matrimonial bed and paying Crowchild $40, the deceased demanded Crowchild give him oral sex as well, just as the woman was trying to leave, court was told.
When he grabbed Crowchild, who’d refused his advances, she picked up a knife in a sink and stabbed the man four times, Greenwood told court.
“When Ms. Crowchild stabbed Mr. Nassereddine in the chest, the knife went through his heart; that was the fatal wound,” she said.
Court heard Nassereddine had heart and mobility problems and walked with a cane.
Greenwood said intercepted phone conversations with friends suggest Crowchild, then 25, wasn’t defending herself when she killed Nassereddine.
“At no time did she say Mr. Nassereddine attacked her or (she) was in a fight for her life,” she told court.
Defence lawyer Jim Lutz noted Nassereddine had enough physical capacity to travel to the downtown East Village where he met Crowchild.
The Crown expects to call 13 witnesses for the trial overseen by Justice Robert Hall that’s expected to last at least a week.
It continues Tuesday.