WINNIPEG — Five years ago this week, Winnipeg grandmother Elizabeth Lafantaisie disappeared and was found dead days later.
Now a jury is tasked with determining if Thomas Brine, 29, charged with first degree murder, is guilty or not guilty.
The nine men and three women on the jury will begin deliberating Wednesday once they’ve been charged by the judge.
They sat through five days of testimony and heard closing arguments Tuesday.
“The evidence is pretty straight forward and there’s a lot of it,” Senior Prosecutor Brian Bell said. “Why did this happen? We’ll never know.”
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The jury heard 73-year old Elizabeth Lafantaisie was beaten, brutally sexually assaulted and strangled to death inside the Summerland Apartment Parkade on February 18, 2011.
In a police interview 10 days after the murder when Brine was arrested, he admitted to stealing Lafantaisie’s car from her apartment parkade on Adamar Road just off Pembina Highway, saying the car was running.
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He admitted to driving the stolen car to Summerland parkade. That’s where he claims he found Lafantaisie’s lifeless body in the trunk.
Brine also admitted to panicking, doing crack cocaine, driving to a car wash to get rid of his fingerprints, and then abandoning the car in Osborne Village.
“Is that the actions of someone so intoxicated that he didn’t know what he was doing?” Bell said in closing arguments. “No.”
“The killer meant to cause Elizabeth Lafantaisie harm and likely knew it would cause her death,” Bell said, and then asked the jury to find Brine guilty.
But Brine’s lawyer, Bruce Bonney said the accused is “not guilty of killing Elizabeth Lafantaisie… someone else attacked her and did the things Mr. Bell is talking about.”
“What truthfully happened here was what he told the police,” Bonney said.
In the taped police interview played for jurors, Brine denied even knowing about the woman’s death. However, after hours of interrogation, he admitted to knowing her body was in the trunk, but denied killing her.
He claimed he found Lafantaisie’s car running with the keys inside in the parkade. He admits to stealing it and going to Summerland to break into more cars. That’s where he opened the trunk, and said he found her body and panicked.
Last week, DNA experts testified that Brine’s DNA was found on the grandmother, and that there was a 1 in 68 trillion chance the DNA was not Brine’s.
But Bonney argued that the forensic experts note taking was questionable. “If you analyze his notes… there’s a good believing that something got mixed up here.”
He said the notes outlining the DNA results were “sloppy, messy and negligent.”
He then asked the jury, why Brine would take this woman – dead or alive – and drive to Summerland. “It’s too risky,” he said.
Bonney wrapped by saying, “there’s other explanations out there, there are other suspects out there.”
The jury will begin deliberating Wednesday afternoon.
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