Detective thought other cases more pressing
Ethics hearing in murder hears from officer probing woman’s claims
The detective assigned to investigate the case of Maria Altagracia Dorval five days before she was killed did nothing on the case because she was busy with other conjugal violence cases she considered more urgent than Dorval’s, the Police Ethics Committee heard Wednesday.
Quebec’s Police Ethics Committee is conducting a hearing into Dorval’s case to determine whether five Montreal police officers who handled it breached the Police Ethics Code and if so, whether and how they should be sanctioned.
On Oct. 11, 2010, Dorval called police and reported that her estranged husband, Edens Kenol, had threatened her life and the lives of her three young children at knifepoint two months earlier, on Aug. 16.
She also reported that more recently, Kenol had been harassing her by pounding on her door, following her in his car and phoning her repeatedly.
On the morning of Oct. 13, 2010, Det.-Sgt Geneviève Leclerc found Dorval’s police report on her desk at the Montreal police Investigations Centre East, Leclerc told the committee.
No one from the police service tried to contact Dorval between Oct. 11, when she made her report, and Oct. 17, when she was found stabbed to death in her Montreal North apartment. Kenol is awaiting trial on charges of first-degree murder in relation to her death.
Leclerc, who had been on the force for 11 years at this point and an investigator for about a year a half, was working on about 17 investigations that week, some more urgent than others, she testified. Five of those cases involved conjugal violence, including Dorval’s, she said.
Leclerc testified that she read the Dorval report at some point during the day on Oct. 13, though she could not recall when.
“For me, this case did not count as an emergency. There was nothing to indicate that this man was about to take action,” she said. “Nothing in the report made me fear for this woman, so I put it back on the pile.”
She intended to contact Dorval within the next few days, she said, but other cases took her longer than she had expected. For example, in one case a man accused of assaulting his wife had been released on the condition he not contact her. He had already showed up at her home twice, was threatening suicide, and had contacted a funeral home and told the director to prepare for his wife’s funeral.
In another conjugal violence case, a man had twice breached his court order not to contact his wife, and the man was calling and threatening her. Leclerc worked on these cases on Oct. 13, 14 and 15, even making calls on one of these cases on her own time, from her home on the evening of Oct. 14.
Leclerc said if she had thought Dorval’s case required immediate attention but could not get to it, she would have told her supervisor to pass it on to another investigator.
She said Montreal police had no specific policy on the books at the time regarding delays in responding to conjugal violence complaints, other than a general policy that victims of a crime against the person (as opposed to a property crime) should be contacted by a detective within 30 days of reporting the crime.
Earlier Wednesday, the committee heard from Det.-Sgt. Mario Plantin, a controller at the investigation centre. He testified that he had skimmed through Dorval’s file when it arrived at the centre on the morning of Oct. 12.
He thought the case was urgent, so he passed it on immediately and directly to Det.-Lt. Marcel Thifault, who is one of the five officers cited in the ethics case. Thifault, whose job it was to distribute cases to detectives, returned to Plantin’s office a short while later and pointed out that the events involving the knife and death threats had happened two months before Dorval went to police.
Plantin told Thifault he had not noticed the date of the knife-related event, and then both agreed the case was not urgent.
The hearing continues Thursday.