“Witness provides gory details at trial”
By Marc Lalonde
The Chronicle, March 22, 2006
Kelly-Anne Drummond’s death was so gory it prompted one of the paramedics who responded to the call to snap photos of the scene because she had lost so much blood, the jury heard yesterday in the second-degree murder trial of her live-in boyfriend Martin Morin-Cousineau.
“It is unusual that I take photos of a scene, but the amount of blood loss didn’t seem appropriate for someone who had merely fallen, and the patient went into cardiac arrest, probably from the blood loss,” said Urgences Santé paramedic Barnet Wexler.
Wexler testified that when he and his partner — the second ambulance on the scene — arrived, Drummond already had no pulse. When the paramedics brought her down the rear stairs out the back door of the Pierrefonds Boulevard building, he began CPR. Wexler said when he heard someone had fallen, the amount of blood seemed excessive for the situation.
“The amount of blood lost was more that I expected when I heard she fell,” said the veteran of 20 years and “thousands,” of incidents involving blood loss. “The blood was coagulating already. If the incident had just happened, that (coagulation) wouldn’t be happening,” he said.
Prosecutor Helène Di Salvo asked Wexler to describe the blood on the floor after Drummond had been transported to hospital.
“It was a large pool around where her head was, about a metre around her head, and about a foot of that on the edges of the pool had already started to coagulate,” he said.
Defence attorneys Nellie Benoit and Sacha Blais did their best to trip Wexler up, noting he made no mention of coagulating blood in either of the two reports he filed that night, but Wexler pointed out that since he had the photos listed on the report, there was not much use to repeat what would be entered as visual evidence.
On Monday, the seven-man, five-woman jury heard that doctors removed a 9.5-centimetre blade from the base of Drummond’s skull and that Drummond, 24, was planning on leaving Morin-Cousineau, 31, because she felt threatened by him.
When the incident occurred in October 2004, police said Morin-Cousineau, who was the only other person in the apartment that night, told them Drummond had fallen in the kitchen while he sat in a chair in the living room.
Morin-Cousineau has been in custody since his arrest.
A popular local fixture on the rugby and lifeguarding scenes at John Abbott College and Concordia University, Drummond’s death drew a packed house at her funeral.
Before proceedings began yesterday morning, Drummond’s mother, Doreen Haddad Drummond could be seen staring holes in Morin-Cousineau as he sat blankly in the prisoner’s box, sporting shoulder-length hair and a dark yellow shirt under a dark grey jacket, unmoving except to take occasional notes. The trial, which is expected to last three weeks, will continue tomorrow at the Palais de Justice in Old Montreal.
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