(Quebec) Amélie Lemieux has provided a disturbing account of the moments after her daughters’ disappearance in the summer of 2020, the story of a mother in crisis who went on her own to find Norah and Romy hours before police sent an AMBER alert .
Posted 12:28pm Updated 1:06pm
“I asked about helicopters, an AMBER alert. It was very long. I didn’t understand,” the woman said Monday, the first day of the coroner’s public inquiry to shed light on the deaths of Norah, Romy and their father Martin Carpentier.
Two and a half years after the events, the wounds are still open. The tiny room in the Quebec City courthouse, filled with lawyers and reporters, struggled to contain their grief. “I’m still stuck on Highway 20 today. »
Amélie Lemieux still doesn’t get it. She still doesn’t understand how the one she considered a “good father” could have killed Norah and Romy. She still doesn’t understand why it took the police so long to start the search.
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, LA PRESSE ARCHIVE
Norah and Romy Carpentier
On July 8, 2020, his phone rang at 9:45 p.m. and the number was withheld. A policeman asks her if her daughters are with her. You are with your father. Twenty minutes earlier, Martin Carpentier’s car wreckage was found on Highway 20 on Quebec’s south coast. The man and the girls are nowhere to be found.
“I got hysterical. I couldn’t control myself anymore. I just wanted to know where my kids were. She goes to the scene of the accident. That evening she confides in an investigator: “I said that Martin doesn’t come from the woods. He’s scared, it doesn’t look like him and we have to find him. He can’t get out of there. »
The next day at dawn, she returns to the scene of the crime. “I decided to go and find my kids. I walked up 20 westbound. I stopped at a rest stop. I asked a truck driver if he had seen my children. I asked him to report it to the other truckers on his credit card. I went to a grocery store to ask questions. »
Hours before the AMBER alert, which finally goes off at 3pm the day after the disappearance, the distraught mother finds herself on the ground asking for help from everyone in her path.
With a friend, she strolls through the small streets near Saint-Apollinaire, where the bodies are finally found days later.
“We arrived at Row Bois Joly, at the crossroads of Rue Bois de l’Ail. I shouted: ‘Norah, Romy’”, Amélie Lemieux recalls. When her friend asks her if she should take the road to Bois de l’Ail, her mother refuses. The street is full of stones. Norah lost a sandal. Amélie Lemieux thinks she can’t walk there.
“I was next to them,” says the mother, who suddenly bursts into tears. “We turned around. I was right next to them. I was so close and I didn’t know. »
A “good father”
The public inquiry, scheduled to last 21 days, is expected to shed light on what could have prevented the tragedy, including policing, but also what motivated the father’s gesture. On Monday, Amélie Lemieux assured that she was still nowhere.
“I can not explain. I’m the last person I think this would have happened to. Hearing things like that on the radio made me feel lucky to have children with a good father,” she said.
She opened up about her relationship with Carpentier at length, having met him through a messaging app in 2008. She opened up about how she was pregnant with Norah at the time, how she and her new beau soon moved in together, and how Carpentier became the official father of the girls in 2010 by adopting her. Romy was born in 2013.
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Martin Zimmerman
She described a completely banal relationship, punctuated by financial hardships, spitting about the division of tasks, which ended in a relatively good agreement in 2015 after arbitration sessions.
In 2020, she recalls her ex-spouse losing weight. With the pandemic, construction sites closed and the house painter ran into financial difficulties.
“He was more worried financially. I told him there was no need to pay child support,” the mother said. “The construction sites have closed. Martin never returned to work. He committed suicide. »
One person then confides in him that Martin Carpentier would be afraid of losing custody of Norah, of whom he was not the biological father.
“He didn’t tell me about it. I don’t remember who told me about it. I knew he was struggling with that bond, that he was afraid of losing custody. I went to him to calm him down and to tell him that he was a good father. »
She and her daughters even gave Martin a 2020 Father’s Day gift just days before the tragedy. It’s an apron that says “Not All Superheroes Wear Capes”.
The bodies of the two girls were found in a wooded area on July 11. The body of the father, who allegedly killed her with a branch, was found five kilometers away on July 20.