“It’s your last day alive my dog, I’m going to kill you”: these are the kind of words that Kim Lebel would have said against an innocent citizen just before he beat his neighbor Jacques Côté to death in Lac- Saint-Charles, according to the memories of a witness heard Thursday morning at the public inquiry.
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Mathieu Tremblay simply wanted to visit his friend who lives on Thibodeau Street on the afternoon of April 6, 2022 when, to change direction, he accidentally backed his van into the driveway of Kim Lebel’s house.
The man, then aged 30, approached him “barefoot”, “with a paunch” and with an “angry” look, brandishing a metal bar. “That’s when he started screaming. I didn’t understand much and he hit my truck box with a metal bar.”
Kim Lebel, who was found not criminally responsible due to mental disorder, had time to smash his driver’s side window before he moved away to a safe distance.
Shortly after, Kim Lebel’s second victim was a resident who was passing by in her car. This is where Mr. Tremblay heard the threatening words towards the driver that he reported on Thursday.
“He was riding on [son] tank, he jumped on the hood, he hit a metal bar everywhere” but fortunately “he never tried to hit her,” described Mr. Tremblay.
This lady’s testimony is scheduled for next week.
While he is in communication with the police, Mathieu Tremblay also witnesses the attack of incredible violence against Jacques Côté who receives “several blows with a metal bar” while he wanted to help his neighbor.
Disjointed remarks
When she arrived, paramedic Camille Lemay-Sauvageau noted the “obvious death” of the sixty-year-old and the “very disoriented” state of Kim Lebel. “He talked about the Vikings, Valhalla, Lucifer. He said I looked like a Viking girl.”
Also on Thursday, two other residents of Thibodeau Street testified to the visibly disturbed mental state in which Kim Lebel was in the hours preceding the tragedy.
They heard him say “come get me” while looking at the sky and they saw him lying on his “tempo” shelter with his dog. One of them also claims that Kim Lebel was running around her house “a bit like in the Hulk movies” in the early afternoon.
However, they did not think of contacting the emergency services, which prompted coroner Me Géhane Kamel to launch an appeal “to the general public” to never hesitate to call the police in similar situations. “We have a little bit of modesty” but “it’s okay to worry about others,” she said.
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