Mom relied heavily on accused killer son, murder trial told

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This article was published 06/06/2022 (932 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Text messages provided to a jury Monday revealed new insights into the relationship between a teenage boy and his alleged murder victim — his mother.

Thousands of pages of text messages uncovered by police, excerpts of which were read in court Monday, show the woman was dependent on her son beginning when he was as young as 14.

The 51-year-old victim was found bludgeoned to death in her bedroom on March 26, 2019. The Free Press is not naming the 51-year-old victim as it would identify the now 19-year-old accused, who cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Court has heard the woman had been off work for several months at the time of her death due to both physical injury and mental health issues.

Text messages between the woman and her son show she had relied on him for years for cooking, shopping and household maintenance chores.

“Remind me to ask you about my phone, the roof and the vet, thanks. And fix my car,” the woman wrote in one May 2017 text when the boy was 14.

In another text exchange from 2014, the woman talked to her son about “dodging a bullet” with an ex-boyfriend.

“Yes, I don’t think it would have worked,” the boy replied. “Now you can find someone else who will make time for you.”

In a September 2018 text, the woman thanked her son for doing the laundry and taking her to Costco for coffee, calling herself “the luckiest mom ever.”

In testimony last week, the woman’s boyfriend at the time of her death described her son as “immensely helpful.”

“I have never seen any teenager do the amount of stuff around the house, of their own volition, that he did,” the 53-year-old man testified. “I mentioned (to the victim) multiple times that I was shocked how much stuff he did around the house.”

Prosecutors allege the then 16-year-old accused bludgeoned his mother to death, then left the house to run some morning “errands” in an attempt to establish an alibi before returning home, discovering her body and calling 911.

The woman’s boyfriend testified he spent several hours at her home the night before the killing, watching the Jets game with her and her son.

The man said the teen had made dinner for his mother and bought her a bouquet of flowers, a picture of which she posted on Facebook with the message: “I don’t know what I did to deserve such an awesome human being for a son.”

“It was a typical evening,” the man said. “We all sat on the couch and watched the game together and joked around.”

The man said the victim “tired easily” and required assistance with chores like grocery shopping.

“She physically could, but I know she asked (her son) to do those types of things and a lot of times he just did it on his own,” he said.

The man said after he returned home and went to bed, the woman continued to text him until 1 a.m. He said when he texted her back the next morning there was no reply. Three hours later, at 11:35 a.m., he sent her a text reading: “Are you alive?”

“In hindsight, it wasn’t something great to send, but it’s a kind of thing I’ve done with other people when I don’t hear back from them,” he said. “It was rare that I wouldn’t get any kind of response for that kind of time frame.”

The man said he didn’t learn the woman was dead until 3 p.m. that day when police showed up at his office and took him to headquarters for questioning.

In a separate interview that same day, the boy told police he had nothing to do with his mother’s murder, claiming he had returned home to find blood spatter on his mother’s closed bedroom door.

The boy opened the door, turned on the light, and saw “she was laying there and she had blood all over her,” he told investigators in an interview video played for jurors last week.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca