Father of murdered woman wants police to get more training on conjugal violence
The father of a murdered young woman wants police to be given more training to handle conjugal violence cases.
On March 22, 2017, Daphné Huard-boudreault was fatally stabbed by her ex-boyfriend, Anthony Pratte-lops, while she tried to recover her personal belongings from his apartment in Mont-sthilaire on the South Shore.
Earlier that day, Huard-boudreault, 18, left her father’s apartment at 5 a.m. to go to work when she found Pratte-lops seated in her car waiting for her.
He insisted on riding with her so they could talk as she drove, and he stayed in the car while she began her shift at a convenience store in Otterburn Park.
However, Huard-boudreault called 911 and asked the Régie intermunicipale de Richelieu-st-laurent (RPRSL) to remove him from her vehicle. She declined to file a complaint, but officers convinced Pratte-lops to go home in a taxi.
At noon, she arrived at a police station in Beloeil and asked whether her Facebook account could be shut down. She said Pratte-lops had taken her phone and was using it to post lies on her Facebook page.
An officer asked Huard-boudreault whether she wanted to file a complaint and report her phone as stolen, but she again declined.
Instead, she agreed to be accompanied by an officer to Prattelops’s apartment to remove her belongings. She assumed he had left the province, based on his social media posts.
Huard-boudreault arrived at the apartment in the afternoon and headed inside. The officer who was to accompany her arrived a minute later and saw that the woman’s car was empty. The officer did not have the apartment number and had to search for it. By the time she found herself in front of the door, Huard-boudreault had already been stabbed. Pratte-lops greeted the officer with blood on his hands.
“Arrest me,” he told the officer before her colleagues found Huard-boudreault, wounded, inside. She was taken to a hospital and died a short time later.
Pratte-lops, 25, pleaded guilty on May 2, 2019 to second-degree murder and received an automatic life sentence. His period of parole ineligibility was set at 18 years.
Éric Boudreault filed a complaint with the Commissaire à la déontologie policière about how members of the RPRSL dealt with his daughter on that fateful day.
On Feb. 28, commissioner Marc-andré Dowd sent Boudreault his decision: He was unable to find fault with the officers’ actions and decided not to hand the case to Quebec’s police ethics committee, which could have held public hearings into the matter.
“As we can read in the report, the police officers did not collaborate in the (commissioner’s) investigation,” Boudreault said on Thursday during a news conference at the Montreal courthouse.
“When we read the decision we see points that (stand out) where we feel the police should have intervened. We find that abnormal.
“It is easy to say that an 18-yearold victim who was terrorized refused to file a complaint.”
Boudreault said he believes his daughter was so afraid of Prattelops that day that she was in shock.
He also said police officers receive only two weeks of training in how to deal with women in conjugal violence situations.
“We have to change the way things are done and (maybe) they should be accompanied by a professional for situations like that,” Boudreault said.
Police officers “have to play the role of doctor, police officer and psychologist. It is a lot and it isn’t right to think that a couple of weeks of training can make someone capable of helping a person who is in a situation involving shock and panic.
“It is wrong. It takes a specialist for that.”