Trial ends for accused in Laval daycare bus crash; judge’s decision coming April 29
Posted April 8, 2025 7:24 am.
Last Updated April 8, 2025 9:46 pm.
The man accused of killing two children and injuring six others when he drove a city bus into a Montreal-area daycare was unable to distinguish right from wrong, a psychiatrist told a trial on Tuesday.
Dr. Sylvain Faucher was the second psychiatrist in two days to testify that Pierre Ny St-Amand was experiencing psychotic symptoms on Feb. 8, 2023, and should not be held criminally responsible — that a mental disorder rendered the accused incapable of appreciating the nature of his actions or knowing they were wrong.
On the second day of the trial, Crown prosecutor Karine Dalphond read out the definition of not criminally responsible in the Laval, Que., courtroom, and Faucher replied, “I believe he responds to that.”
Ny St-Amand, 53, is accused of ramming a bus into the Laval daycare, killing a four-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl. After the crash, the accused stood inside the mangled bus and undressed, speaking and yelling incoherently before he was subdued by parents on the scene.
Faucher testified that a possible untreated post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from Ny St-Amand’s childhood as an orphan in war-torn Cambodia left him “fragile” to stressors. The doctor said it’s impossible to know why Ny St-Amand acted in the way he did, but the witness speculated that the accused might have attacked the daycare during his psychosis as a way of “killing his own past.”
“We can ask whether the link exists between the significant traumas experienced by the accused during his childhood and the fact that, during an episode of illness, he aimed at individuals of a comparable age to his own when he suffered various abuse and was confronted by highly tragic situations,” Faucher told the court. “This supposes he knew he was crashing into a daycare, at some level.”
On Monday, Dr. Kim Bédard-Charette told the first day of the trial that the accused was likely experiencing psychosis at the time he drove the bus into the building. Faucher evaluated Ny St-Amand separately at the request of the Crown and reached largely the same conclusion, though he characterized the psychotic episode as “brief” rather than “unspecified,” as Bédard-Charette had.
In response to their evaluations, both the Crown and defence presented the facts of Ny St-Amand’s case jointly. After Faucher’s testimony ended, they recommended in separate closing statements that he should be considered not criminally responsible.
Court documents state Ny St-Amand was born in Cambodia in 1972, shortly before the Khmer Rouge began a brutal rule that is blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people. Both his parents died as a result of the conflict, and he doesn’t know his real birthday. He was moved to various refugee camps under the guardianship of a cousin, who also died. He was physically assaulted by the cousin’s wife, who strung him up by his feet and beat him. In 1982, he was sent to Canada by a humanitarian agency and adopted by a Quebec family.
Faucher told the court that Ny St-Amand’s past and lack of close emotional relationships, even with his wife and adopted family, left him poorly equipped to cope with stressors that might appear unremarkable to others. Those included a costly family trip planned to Disney World and his impending marriage to his longtime partner.
Like Bédard-Charette, Faucher said Ny St-Amand had exhibited many of the classic symptoms of psychosis, including agitation, memory loss, delirium and strange behaviour. As an example, Faucher noted that after his arrest, Ny St-Amand was found naked in his cell, walking an imaginary line on the floor.
During Tuesday’s testimony, the accused stared straight ahead, sometimes closing his eyes and appearing to briefly nod off.
Accused being treated as victim, parents say
Listening to the testimony, many parents in the courtroom were visibly upset and crying.
“Right now, the two persons that have an impact are the two psychiatrists that weren’t there on site,” said Mélanie Goulet, whose seven-year-old daughter was hurt in the crash. “And they didn’t experience anything. And they will change everything in the outcome.”
Goulet says she feels the proceedings have been very unfair to those directly impacted by the accused, and she feels the accused is being treated as a victim rather than the children and parents.
“It’s been two years now. He’s been in a facility with a really big team. And everything is for his recovery,” Goulet said. “What about us? What about the kids? Like our kids were five years old when this happened. They were telling us about his past. Like he was young. He suffered a lot. OK, fine. What about our kids? They suffered a lot. They had a big trauma. It’s a big trauma during the development. What’s going to happen in 10 years, 15 years? Who’s going to be there for them?”
The Crown and defence have jointly presented the facts and will recommend that the judge find the accused not criminally responsible, which made parents very unhappy.
“So they were basically trying to justify his actions by his past,” said Goulet. “But we all have a past. We all have stress in our life. We all deal with different stuff. But basically he was trying to justify everything he did.”
“I’m upset right now because all of this for me doesn’t make sense,” added Annie Carrière, whose four-year-old son witnessed the tragedy. “It doesn’t make sense that we’re still there waiting for no reason, because at the end, there’s no reason for us to be there. Like everything is already planned. It’s all planned, so we’re there just to be there.”
Carrière says the whole process has felt like an “injustice” — the fact that they were not able to have their voice in the trial, which was brief and before a judge only.
Pierre-Luc Gauthier, the father of the boy who lost his life at the Sainte-Rose daycare, published an open letter in La Presse on Tuesday morning denouncing the lack of mental health support for indirect victims of the tragedy.
Gauthier finds it distressing that his daughter, who lost her brother Jacob on Feb. 8, 2023, is only entitled to 30 psychotherapy sessions covered by the IVAC.
“In the eyes of the state (…), she will never be anything other than the victim’s sister, mere collateral damage in a sick society. At just 7 years old, and for the rest of her life, she has joined the select group of the left behind, the club of those whose fate we would prefer not to know, the forgotten,” he lamented.
In Quebec City, Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette said he was “very sensitive to the reality faced by families,” but he was very clear: Quebec will not reopen the law to further expand the scope of IVAC. The minister did, however, indicate he had “asked the teams to see if there were any solutions that could be found within the parameters of the current law.”
Quebec Superior Court Justice Éric Downs presided over the hearings and will make the final decision on Ny St-Amand’s criminal responsibility on April 29. Ny St-Amand has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder, and assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm in relation to six other children who were injured.
Downs told the courtroom on Tuesday that a finding of criminal non-responsibility is neither an acquittal nor a conviction in the sense of the law. He said there was no doubt that the accused committed acts that have “dismayed all of us … and in particular the victims and their loved ones.”
The Crown indicated that they will seek to have Ny St-Amand declared a “high-risk accused,” which would require he face stricter rules around absences from his designated treatment facility.
–With files from La Presse Canadienne
