For brutal domestic slaying, a powerful nighttime guilty verdict of 1st-degree murder
CBC
WARNING: This story contains graphic descriptions of intimate partner violence.
After months of abuse, threats, manipulation and control by her on again, off again partner, 24-year-old Marie "Mimi" Gabriel was done.
She told 40-year-old Jean-Bruno "Berno" Fenelon — 16 years her senior, who started seeing her when she was 17 — to leave the south Ottawa home she'd fled to with their two young children months earlier, with help from social services.
But it wasn't working. She texted the man she was seeing that Fenelon wanted to fight her, that he wouldn't leave.
And she spoke to her closest friend Norlande Tassy by phone, who heard Gabriel's last known utterance:
"Get the f--k out of my house!" she screamed. Then nothing. Tassy stayed on the line, but never heard Gabriel's voice again.
It was the morning of March 26, 2022. Gabriel was found dead by police on the concrete floor of her basement two days later, in a dried pool of her own blood.
Late Friday night, in a darkened, near-empty courthouse, a jury of nine women and three men found Fenelon guilty of first-degree murder after a trial that spanned six weeks in Ottawa's Superior Court.
Fenelon was sentenced by Justice Ian Carter to life in prison without parole for 25 years, which happens automatically when someone is convicted of murder in the first degree in Canada.
The jury accepted the evidence that it was Fenelon who, in a jealous rage, struck Gabriel at least twice in the head with a 30-pound dumbbell — almost instantly fatal blows delivered as she was already lying battered on the floor.
It came after Fenelon had struck her, dragged her and chased her around her basement — evidence of which was found in the bloody footprints her bare feet left on the concrete.
The strikes with the dumbbell were delivered with "severe force;" the kind usually seen in car wrecks or falls from a great height, Crown attorney Dallas Mack said in his closing remarks. They were "clear indicators" of Fenelon's intense hatred for Gabriel.
"This was personal," Mack said.
Afterward, Fenelon dumped his clothes and boots, stained with Gabriel's blood, at Petrie Island along the Ottawa River. Homicide investigators followed GPS breadcrumbs from Fenelon's phone to the area and searched it for days before finding them.
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