Quebec’s coroner is pointing out several shortcomings in the Sureté du Québec (SQ) search for two missing girls and their father in the summer of 2020.
Luc Malouin tabled his 85-page public inquiry report into the deaths of Norah, 11, and Romy, 6, on Tuesday.
In it, he examines the events leading up to the girls’ deaths and the subsequent suicide of their father, Martin Carpentier.
According to testimony by friends and family, Carpentier expressed that he greatly feared losing custody of his daughters in his impending divorce.
“Yet everyone around him reassured him that he would never lose custody and that he was a good father to his daughters,” the report notes.
According to the coroner, the tipping point was on July 8, 2020, when the family went out for ice cream and got into a car accident on Highway 20 near Saint-Apollinaire.
“In his panic, he fled with his daughters, and it was only over the next few hours, as he gradually realized the untenable situation in which he had placed himself, that the idea of killing his daughters before taking his own life came to him,” Malouin writes.
