‘Don’t leave me; please comfort me’

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This article was published 08/11/2017 (2673 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

No “problem clients” were on a local law firm’s radar before an explosion rocked the office and seriously injured a lawyer, court heard Wednesday at an accused bomber’s attempted murder trial.

Petersen King partner Connie Petersen testified that lawyer Maria Mitousis had only been with the firm for a few months when a bomb went off inside her office on July 3, 2015.

“At that time, I was not aware of any files that caused me concern,” she said in response to questions from Crown attorney Chris Vanderhooft, confirming during cross-examination from defence lawyer Saheel Zaman that she was not aware of any clients who had shown particular animosity toward the firm.

Court heard Mitousis, who lost her right hand in the explosion, had represented Iris Amsel during her divorce from Guido Amsel.

Guido Amsel, 51, has pleaded not guilty to five counts of attempted murder and several explosives-related charges and is on trial in provincial court before Judge Tracey Lord, who heard Wednesday from staff at the River Avenue family law firm about what happened in the moments before and after the sudden blast.

Petersen said she didn’t remember talking about Iris Amsel’s file with Mitousis before the explosion.

She rushed to Mitousis’s aid as soon as she heard a loud bang and screams. As she ran down the hallway toward Mitousis’s office, she saw smoke in the air and smelled something burning, Petersen recalled.

Mitousis was in the doorway of her office, covered in blood and clutching her abdomen, Petersen said. When she stepped past her and looked into the office, Petersen said she could see the window had been shattered. Her first thought was that a shot had been fired through the window into Mitousis’s office.

She said her instinct was to put pressure on Mitousis’s wounds, the places where she thought the blood was coming from. Soon, other employees who had been on the phone with 911 dispatchers called out that they were being urged to evacuate the building by police, Petersen said.

“Maria looked up at me and said, ‘Don’t leave me; please comfort me.’ I stayed with Maria. Everyone else left,” she said.

“It seemed like an eternity, just waiting for emergency personnel to arrive,” Petersen said later in her testimony.

She testified another employee pulled the door to Mitousis’s office closed while they sat against the door frame, waiting for help. Petersen said she didn’t enter Mitousis’s office and believed no other employees had either.

The blast caused about $120,000 in damages to the building and required Mitousis’s office to be fully renovated, court heard.

Mitousis, who has since returned to work, is expected to testify later in the trial, which is scheduled to wrap up in mid-December. Guido Amsel is accused in two explosions: one at Mitousis’s office on July 3, 2015, and one at his ex-wife’s home in 2013.

He is also accused of mailing three explosive packages in July 2015: one to Mitousis, one to Iris Amsel and one to the law firm of his former lawyer. After the explosion at Mitousis’s office, the other two suspicious packages were contained by police bomb units.

Court also heard from a legal assistant and receptionist who accepted the mail the day before the explosion and placed the package on Mitousis’s desk.

Karlee Kaplan said one of her duties is to open work-related mail received by the firm, but she decided not to open the package addressed to Mitousis that day.

The label was handwritten and the return address was that of the law firm Mitousis worked at before she joined Petersen King, Kaplan said.

“I just figured that it was something personal, so I did not open it,” she said.

She placed the package on Mitousis’s desk on Thursday afternoon, July 2, 2015. Mitousis wasn’t in the office that day, so the package remained there until the next morning.

The trial has heard an explosive believed to be inside a recording device was in the package, along with a note police later reconstructed. The note instructed Mitousis to “press play” and listen to a recording that purported to be helpful to her “defence.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @thatkatiemay

Katie May
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Katie May is a general-assignment reporter for the Free Press.

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