He stole our innocent child: Families of fatal Quebec daycare crash relate heavy toll

By Canadian Press on May 1, 2025.

LAVAL — The mother of a four-year-old boy killed when a city bus plowed into a Montreal-area daycare in 2023 told a courtroom on Thursday how angry she is at the accused for “breaking” her family.

“He stole our innocent child who only wanted to play with his friends and his sister,” said Marie-Christine Cloutier about the man on trial for killing her son Jacob and a five-year-old girl, and injuring six other children on Feb. 8, 2023.

Cloutier and other members of families affected by the attack read victim-impact statements in a courtroom in Montreal’s northern suburb of Laval, Que., days after a Superior Court judge found the accused — fifty-three-year-old former city bus driver Pierre Ny St-Amand — not criminally responsible for what he did.

“I am so angry with him for dragging us into this whirlwind we didn’t choose, for breaking us,” Cloutier told the courtroom through a video stream.

On Tuesday, Justice Éric Downs accepted the joint conclusion from the Crown and the defence that Ny St-Amand was unable to discern right from wrong at the time of the fatal crash. Psychiatrists for the Crown and the defence had both concluded Ny St-Amand was likely experiencing psychosis when he drove the bus into the daycare, killing Jacob and a five-year-old girl named Maëva, whose family name is covered by a publication ban at the request of her parents.

Downs’ ruling came as cold comfort to some in the courtroom on Thursday.

In a statement read into the record, Maëva’s mother, who wasn’t present in court, said the loss of her little girl has deeply shaken the family, adding that it has been difficult to explain to her two other children how to live with this trauma. “They can’t understand why the person who turned our lives upside down isn’t criminally responsible,” she wrote.

Maëva’s father spoke about how his youngest child had just celebrated her fifth birthday on Feb. 1. He described her as “creative, focused, meticulous, playful.”

On one of her final mornings with the family, Maëva asked to be filmed behind a small cake topped with a candle. She closed her eyes and said, “I wish that the whole family remains together,” her father told the court.

He said she then blew out the candle, opened her eyes, and smiled hopefully. “Some wishes are lost,” he said.

Cloutier said she will never get an answer as to why her child was taken from her. “At 36, we’re not supposed to prepare our child’s funeral.”

While the statements were read in a courtroom thick with tears and emotion, Ny St-Amand sat impassively in the prisoner’s box.

Prosecutors have said they plan to argue that Ny St-Amand should be declared a high-risk offender, a designation that would impose stricter rules on him and require any decision taken by the provincial mental health tribunal to be confirmed by the Superior Court.

Ny St-Amand’s lawyers have announced they will challenge the Crown’s position.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 1, 2025.

Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press