At Sherbrooke Courthouse in Estrie, the first witnesses were heard in the trial of Kevin Sanders, accused of the first degree murder of Joël Mailhot.
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For the jury, prosecuting attorney Me Geneviève Crépeau presented the incidents at the Urbaine tavern as crimes of extreme violence.
Details are extremely difficult for the victim’s family to hear.
Gérard Mailhot has made it his duty to be present in court for his son Joël, the victim of this brutal attack, but also to try to understand what really happened on the evening of August 17, 2020 at the Urban Tavern.
In her opening statement to the seven men and five women on the jury, the prosecutor mentioned that Kevin Sanders was in a bad mood that night.
The defendant, who is seated at the bar to the right of the screen in CCTV footage, and the victim, who is seated on the left, did not know each other.
The 28-year-old got angry when the waitress told him she was closing soon.
“He was angry with the waitress […] he wanted to finish his beer,” Me Crépeau told them.
The waitress warned him that if he refused to cooperate, she would call the police.
When she called the police, Kevin Sanders reacted violently by grabbing the 51-year-old victim to throw him to the ground.
“He punched him in the face and head 18 times. […]and then four heel kicks.”
The first witness heard was Mathieu Grenier, the first policeman to intervene in the bar.
The victim was lying on the ground in a pool of blood, his face was swollen and deformed, he told the jury.
Despite resuscitation, the man never regained consciousness.
So unrecognizable that he had no identification papers with him, police were finally able to use his fingerprints to identify the victim as Joël Mailhot, 51, of Sherbrooke.
Rather unusual in a second-degree murder trial, Kevin Sanders defends himself and refuses the help of a lawyer.
At the beginning of the hearing this morning, as the clerk read him the indictment, he remained calm, unmoved; The judge interpreted his silence as a plea of not guilty.
Kevin Sanders stood in the defendant’s box and surveyed the jury and the people in the room.
With every question the judge asked him, he remained frozen, frozen, sunk in his silence. Behavior that leaves the victim’s family in disbelief.
In total, prosecutors want to present nine witnesses, including the waitress who witnessed the events and a coroner.