WARNING: This story contains graphic descriptions of intimate partner violence.
After months of abuse, threats, manipulation and control by her on again, off again partner, 24-year-old Marie “Mimi” Gabriel was done.
She told 40-year-old Jean-Bruno “Berno” Fenelon — 16 years her senior, who started seeing her when she was 17 — to leave the south Ottawa home she’d fled to with their two young children months earlier, with help from social services.
But it wasn’t working. She texted the man she was seeing that Fenelon wanted to fight her, that he wouldn’t leave.
And she spoke to her closest friend Norlande Tassy by phone, who heard Gabriel’s last known utterance:
“Get the f–k out of my house!” she screamed. Then nothing. Tassy stayed on the line, but never heard Gabriel’s voice again.
It was the morning of March 26, 2022. Gabriel was found dead by police on the concrete floor of her basement two days later, in a dried pool of her own blood.
A long day of deliberating
Late Friday night, in a darkened, near-empty courthouse, a jury of nine women and three men found Fenelon guilty of first-degree murder after a trial that spanned six weeks in Ottawa’s Superior Court.
Fenelon was sentenced by Justice Ian Carter to life in prison without parole for 25 years, which happens automatically when someone is convicted of murder in the first degree in Canada.
The jury accepted the evidence that it was Fenelon who, in a jealous rage, struck Gabriel at least twice in the head with a 30-pound dumbbell — almost instantly fatal blows delivered as she was already lying battered on the floor.
It came after Fenelon had struck her, dragged her and chased her around her basement — evidence of which was found in the bloody footprints her bare feet left on the concrete.
The strikes with the dumbbell were delivered with “severe force;” the kind usually seen in car wrecks or falls from a great height, Crown attorney Dallas Mack said in his closing remarks. They were “clear indicators” of Fenelon’s intense hatred for Gabriel.
“This was personal,” Mack said.
Disposed-of evidence recovered by police
Afterward, Fenelon dumped his clothes and boots, stained with Gabriel’s blood, at Petrie Island along the Ottawa River. Homicide investigators followed GPS breadcrumbs from Fenelon’s phone to the area and searched it for days before finding them.
It was Fenelon who called 911 to report finding Gabriel’s body two days after his attack, under the guise that he had discovered her body for the first time while trying to drop off their children.
With its guilty verdict, the jury rejected Toronto-based defence lawyer Ari Goldkind’s assertion in his closing remarks that the Crown hadn’t proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Goldkind had argued Fenelon had nothing to hide about the “toxic, terrible,” nature of his relationship with Gabriel, and that he repeatedly told investigators he had nothing to do with the crime and wouldn’t kill the mother of his children.
He also said it was improbable that an “Incredible Hulk” like Fenelon could escape a fight without a scratch.
Parents describe intense guilt
After the guilty verdict, as Gabriel’s family and friends read their victim impact statements, many in the courtroom cried, including most of the jurors and homicide detectives Guy Seguin and Jennifer McLinton (who now works for another unit).
Gabriel’s mother, Fatou Gabriel, wrote that her guilt for not doing more to protect her daughter “kills me every day … pains me to my bones … keeps me up every night.”
She asked her daughter to come home “over and over, but because she was scared of Berno, she refused.”
Her father, Andy Stone, called Fenelon a “woman-beating coward” who “ripped [Gabriel’s] character to shreds” even after murdering her. But he also described feelings of guilt.
“How can I even begin to express my regrets for not being the father she deserved? For not acting differently? He hurt my little girl, and I did nothing. I let her down,” he told court.
‘Senseless brutality’
Gabriel’s older brother, David Gabriel, told Fenelon that day after day, he looked at him in the prisoner’s dock and hoped to see “an ounce of remorse.”
“But these past few weeks only confirmed to me that you are a sadistic sociopath, who laughed at my father when he testified. You enjoyed seeing his pain.”
Her younger brother, Ian Stone, told Fenelon he “tortured” the family.
“You have earned your place behind bars, stripped of freedom, and there is no better fate for someone who acted with such senseless brutality.”
‘It was the right thing’
Outside the courthouse, just before midnight, the family was relieved.
“It was the right thing,” Andrew Stone said. “Twelve decent people, decent, decent people — they weren’t fooled. They didn’t believe his lies. They didn’t believe it was someone else.”
And he had a message for girls and women.
“If you’re with a guy and he’s aggressive verbally, physically, run. Don’t say you’ll forgive him and he won’t do it again, because he will do it again. Run.
“And parents, listen to your kids. … Because you don’t want to be like me. I’m standing here talking to you now, my daughter’s dead. Full out. Dead.”