MONTREAL – Their grief is so severe, they’ve been labelled disabled by Quebec’s pension board.
Unable to work, let alone wring an apology out of the owners of the building whose concrete slab crushed their daughter and only child in 2009, Micheline and Michel Guilbeault are now turning to the courts to claim $1.1 million in damages, including lost wages.
“Nothing’s going to bring our daughter back and nothing will take away the pain,” Micheline Guilbeault said Tuesday in a telephone interview, her voice heavy with sadness. “It’s like living in hell.”
The Guilbeaults received a panicked phone call on July 16, 2009, from their son-in-law, Hani Beitinjaneh.
He was at the Mikasa Sushi Bar on Peel St., where he and his new wife, Léa Guilbeault, had been celebrating with a birthday lunch. Something horrible had happened.
The Guilbeaults raced to the hospital, where they found their injured and traumatized son-in-law, who couldn’t say where Léa was or even explain what had happened.
For an hour and a half, Micheline Guilbeault said, they searched in vain for their daughter, unaware that she hadn’t even been brought to the hospital.
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“We had to figure out on our own that she wasn’t even there,” she said. They raced back to the sushi restaurant, where a gruesome, nightmarish scene awaited.
Their daughter had been crushed to death instantly by a massive chunk of concrete that had fallen 18 floors from the building’s exterior wall.
The 320-kilogram mass fell through the restaurant’s glassed-in patio roof and landed directly on the young couple’s corner table.
Beitinjaneh, who suffered a broken right leg, a nearly amputated finger, and four fractures in his right hand that required two operations and hours of physiotherapy, has since become somewhat of an activist about Montreal’s crumbling infrastructure.
The two defendants named in the suit – Ozre Montreal Locataire ULC, the building’s owner, and Résidence Inn Montréal Centre-Ville, which occupied the building – could not be reached for comment.
Lawyer Julis Grey, representing the plaintiffs, said the companies will have to prove they did everything possible to prevent the accident from happening, when building inspection reports suggest otherwise.
“They’d have to prove it was an act of God,” he said. “That it was such an unforeseen thing, like a meteor arriving from outer space.”
Micheline Guilbeault sees the suit as a way of making the companies accountable.
“I have a home and am responsible for what happens to it, just like they have a responsibility to keep their building in order,” she said.
The Guilbeaults and their daughter lived together, until Léa got married at 31, two years before her death. She and Beitinjaneh then lived above the Guilbeaults and saw each other often. Beitinjaneh still lives there.
“Léa Guilbeault was radiant, happy, full of enthusiasm, a joy for all, especially her parents,” the lawsuit says. Since their loss, Micheline Guilbeault, 59, who was a controller for a clothing company, and her husband, 61, who drove a taxi, have been unable to work.
Both have been diagnosed with severe depression and continue to mourn. They have a shrine to their daughter at home, and visit her grave weekly.
“When this happens, your life ends,” Micheline Guilbeault said, adding they both stay at home feeling lost and “blank.” She can’t stop crying, the document says, and is unable to function in order to socialize or enjoy life.
Léa’s father sold his taxi licence and is on anti-depressants to deal with his profound sadness. The suit asks for $250,000 each in moral damages for the loss of their only child, who was particularly close to her parents. It also asks for $690,546 in lost wages.
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