Judge declares accused in fatal Laval daycare bus crash not criminally responsible
Posted April 29, 2025 4:00 am.
Last Updated April 29, 2025 5:52 pm.
A Quebec man has been found not criminally responsible for his actions after he drove a city bus into a Montreal-area daycare in 2023, killing two children and injuring six others, a Superior Court judge found on Tuesday.
Justice Éric Downs told the court in Laval that he accepts the joint recommendation of criminal non-responsibility from the Crown and the defence in the case of Pierre Ny St-Amand.
The accused will be detained at the Philippe-Pinel Institute.
“It’s not an acquittal,” explained prosecutor Simon Blais. “The accused will be followed basically for a long period of time by the (Commission d’examen des troubles mentaux). And as the judge stated, for now he’s detained. He will be detained as long as the procedure will go on. And if he’s declared high risk, he will be detained as long as the court, the Superior Court, deems appropriate to detain him.”
Blais says Ny St-Amand’s status will be revised every year by the commission.
“If the commission is of the opinion that the status should be removed, at that point it refers the file to the court, and it’s the court that has a final word on whether or not the status should be removed,” the prosecutor said.
In a 41-page decision, Downs found that it was undeniable that Ny St-Amand committed the acts and they were not an accident, but he added that he could not judge the quality of his actions, nor understand whether they were right or wrong.
“The basis of criminal law is to punish people who are morally guilty, therefore people who want their actions to be final,” Blais said. “This is somewhat the goal of the non-criminal responsibility, that we do not imprison in an ordinary prison people who do not have this moral guilt.”
Parents of children who were present at the daycare on Feb. 8, 2023, brought to tears inside and outside the courtroom, calling it a heavy day.
“Our children are victims,” said Catherine Beaudoin, parent of two children who were at the daycare that day. “I’m lucky to have both of my children — one with a lot of trauma. But I think there won’t ever be words to describe this and it will never pass.”
“I feel like there’s no justice at this point,” said Mélanie Goulet, whose daughter was injured in crash. “It’s shocking to us, like to see how they talk about him. Sometimes it feels like he’s the victim. He’s the one being taken care of.”
The judge will hear statements from the victims at a hearing on Thursday.
Initially, the trial was meant to be held before a judge and a jury. But in February of this year, discussions took place with both the Crown and defence and it was decided that it would be before a judge alone and presented under joint proof that he should be found not criminally responsible.
Separate psychiatrists — one for the Crown, the other for the defence — evaluated Ny St-Amand and came to the same conclusion: it is likely he was experiencing psychosis when he drove the bus into the daycare in Laval, Que., on the morning of Feb. 8, 2023.
Ny St-Amand, a former Laval public transit employee, is charged with two counts of second-degree murder, and assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm in relation to the six other children who were injured.
One psychiatrist testified that 53-year-old Ny St-Amand had untreated post-traumatic stress disorder from his childhood as an orphan in war-torn Cambodia and might have targeted the daycare as a way of “killing his own past.”
“They made their defence on his traumas from when he was young, like he had a lot of traumas, but that’s the case for our kids,” Goulet said. “They had big trauma at four and five years old. So what’s gonna happen next? Who’s going to take care of them?”
“We are the victims and probably he is the victim of the system,” said Sébastien Courtois, parent of a child that was injured in the crash. “So we have to do something that refugees need more help because they come from difficult situations.”
Downs said in his decision that unfortunately, the question of why St-Amand did this will remain unanswered.
In court Tuesday, Ny St-Amand sat there wearing a grey sweatshirt and was expressionless as he heard the decision.
The Crown has said it will seek to have Ny St-Amand declared a “high-risk accused,” a designation that involves stricter rules governing absences from any treatment facility.
Downs has cautioned that a finding of criminal non-responsibility is neither an acquittal nor a conviction in the sense of the law, adding that there is no doubt the accused committed the acts.
