Mother beaten to death with ‘tremendous amount of force’

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This article was published 07/06/2022 (932 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg woman whose son is on trial charged with her murder was bludgeoned so forcefully in the head a pathologist likened her injuries to those suffered in a high-speed car crash.

“Those kinds of injuries could not be produced by simple punches or kicks,” chief medical examiner Dr. John Younes testified Tuesday.

The 51-year-old woman was found beaten to death in her bed on March 26, 2019, after her then 16-year-old son called 911 claiming he had returned to their Winnipeg home from running errands and discovered she had been the victim of an attack.

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.

Younes said the victim was beaten about the head and arms at least a dozen times with a heavy blunt weapon such as a baseball bat or crowbar.

“A tremendous amount of force” would have been required to inflict the injuries, which included defensive wounds to the woman’s arms, Younes said during a review of autopsy pictures with prosecutor Erika Dolcetti.

The woman’s skull was shattered and “broken into many fragments” in the attack, Younes said.

“The fractures were such that I could see directly into the cranial cavity and brain matter,” Younes said.

Younes, noting the absence of rigor mortis at the time police arrived at the woman’s home shortly before 11 a.m., estimated the woman could have been dead up to four hours or for merely minutes.

Younes said the woman may have survived several minutes after the attack before choking to death on her blood.

In an interview with police that same day, the woman’s son told investigators 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.

The teen also told investigators his mother had been off work due to health issues and had previously submitted a harassment complaint against a co-worker. That was the only person he could think of who might have harmed her, he told police.

Det.-Sgt. Kenneth Lepage told jurors Tuesday he interviewed the “person of interest,” and found his claims as to his whereabouts around the time of the killing were confirmed by electronic records showing his arrival and departure from work and a sign-in sheet showing he had dropped his children off at the YMCA.

Lepage said no witnesses could place the man or his vehicle near the murder scene at any time.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca