Doctor testifies children’s deaths did not look natural
The information coming through on Georges Picard’s emergency radio kept shifting. At first, the call was about two children who had fallen ill. Then it escalated: the two children were in a coma, and finally, he learned, they were in cardiac arrest. But by the time Picard, a doctor working with Urgences-Santé, arrived at Adele Sorella’s home in Laval, he knew it was too late. Paramedics had already called off any resuscitation attempts. The girls, Amanda, 9, and Sabrina, 8, were on their backs, side-by-side in the family’s playroom. There were no obvious signs of violence, but they had already started turning grey and blue. Their jaws were too rigid to open. Picard got down on his knees next to them and confirmed his initial thought: there was nothing left to do. “I’m not a specialist, not a coroner or a toxicologist or a pathologist,” Picard answered in court Monday when asked how he thought the girls had died. “But my clinical impression? It wasn’t natural . ... I had the impression it was a double medical intoxication.” Sorella, 52, is on trial for two counts of first-degree murder for her daughters’ deaths on March 31, 2009. She has pleaded not guilty. Earlier Monday, jurors heard how police were still trying to establish a cause of death more than a month after the girls were found dead. While testifying, Louis Galarneau, a retired Laval police officer who handled the evidence in the case, described how the force considered all possibilities in the early days of the investigation. After learning Picard had suggested there was a possibility the victims had been drugged or poisoned, Galarneau was in charge of collecting all unidentified liquids or substances found throughout the home. He also sought any documentation related to medication the victims’ parents might have been taking. An initial autopsy had suggested the girls had maybe been drugged. A second autopsy ruled out the presence of any chemicals from toxic household items, but didn’t rule out traces of drugs or medication. Specifically, Galarneau was told to keep an eye out for any beige-coloured medication that would have been crushed into powder form. The jury is yet to hear any results from the various tests performed. The cause of death is also yet to be established during the trial. The Crown intends to prove Sorella had the “exclusive opportunity” to kill her two daughters.