Murder of a woman in Laval | A mother would have been targeted at random

The woman murdered Wednesday in Laval, a real estate agent and daycare teacher with no history, was apparently targeted randomly while she was walking in a wooded area near her home. An atrocious end that his son struggles to explain.

“It’s so difficult for my brain that I can’t analyze it,” Robert Draghicescu testified the day after the tragedy.

Met on Thursday in the apartment on Boulevard Chomedey that he shared with his mother, Irina Draghicescu, the 26-year-old young man displayed a disconcerting calm.

the day before, a few hours after the tragedy, two officers from the Laval City Police Service (SPL) knocked on his door to tell him the terrible news, he said. “Given the time, I suspected that something had happened,” he testifies.

Free Murder

Arriving from Romania about 25 years ago, Irina Draghicescu worked both as an educator in a Montreal daycare and as a real estate broker under the Groupe Sutton brand. Separated for many years, she had no partner or known enemy, according to her son.

His mother simply found herself “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says, resigned. “ [Le suspect] was armed. It was a matter of who was passing by. »

The tragedy occurred shortly before 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, while Irina Draghicescu was walking in the Armand-Frappier wooded area, not far from her home, as she often did. It was at this point that she was stabbed numerous times, her attacker not giving her a chance. His death was pronounced on the spot.

According to our information, the hypothesis of gratuitous murder emerged quite early in the police investigation when the victim, aged 46, shared no family ties with the murder suspect.

Taking refuge in an apartment

The suspect, Konstantinos Tsagaroulis, 20, was charged Thursday with first degree murder the day after the crime and appeared by videoconference at the Laval courthouse. According to several media outlets, the Crown does not intend to request a psychiatric evaluation in his case.

It appears that after killing Irina Draghicescu, the young man broke into the basement apartment of a building located a few hundred meters from the scene.

Frightened, tenants of the building contacted the police who quickly intervened, alerted to the presence of an individual with a disturbed mental state.

“We heard the sirens, we went out and we saw 15, 20 police cars, then we [a vu les policiers] take someone out of there, handcuffed,” testified one of the neighbors of the building, Nacer Benacur.

Nebulous pattern

The exact motive for this gratuitous attack remains unclear. Konstantinos Tsagaroulis did not have a criminal record and lived with his parents, in Laval-Ouest, several kilometers away, in a quiet neighborhood of single-storey houses.

“Our thoughts are truly with the victim’s family who are going through very sad times,” said his father, John Tsagaroulis, met at the family home.

At the end of Thursday afternoon, the latter claimed to have no further details regarding the course of events. “Like all young people, he had friends, he took the car and went out,” he added when asked what his son was doing in the Armand-Frappier woods.

“A place we love”

The murder of Irina Draghicescu shocked several neighbors of the place, a small park that many residents use to access Notre-Dame Boulevard from where they have access to the bus stops.

“It’s always very quiet, it’s a place we love,” said Ghassan Hajjar, a resident of the Chomedey district for 25 years. “This is the first time I’ve heard something like this. It’s terrible,” added one of his neighbors, George Carter.

The name of Irina Draghicescu is added to a long list of women murdered since the start of the year. The number of women killed in the context of domestic violence in 2024 has already exceeded the total for the previous year.

With Daniel Renaud, The Press