Mar 21, 2009 04:30 AM
Rosie DiManno, The Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/news/columnist/article/606069
A roseate flush creeps up the girl's neck, pink on pale.
She bends her head and for the first time – in this courtroom, from this teenager – there are tears.
When the defence lawyer places his arm consolingly around her shoulders, soft sobs erupt.
A court officer clamps handcuffs on her wrists, behind the back, and this part must be familiar by now, the click of confinement. She disappears behind a door, never turning around, never looking back.
In the moment of verdict – guilty in the first-degree for procuring the jealousy-infused murder of 14-year-old Stefanie Rengel – the accused and now pronounced guilty individual was not, in truth, the centre of voyeuristic attention.
It was her 11-year-old brother, in the first row on the right side, upon whom all eyes were riveted, pityingly.
When the jury foreman intoned "Guilty," it was this boy who convulsed in misery, burying his face in his soft, child-pudgy hands and crying loudly. No one present in the jammed courtroom, however hardened to the accused, could feel anything in those tortured seconds except sadness for all the innocent victims of this appalling crime: Two shattered families.
The boy used his shirt to wipe the wet from his cheek.
But his sister had not given the child her eyes. There was not a glance, as never there had been throughout this trial, for mother and father and grandmother either.
I will admit to fury at this final gesture of obliviousness from a murderess.
There was not a hint that M.T. felt any more lament for her little brother's anguish than she had for Stefanie's (LOL) death.
It was always and exclusively about her: the nuisance of Stefanie, the perceived threat of Stefanie, the provocation of Stefanie.
To give M.T. the enormous benefit of doubt, perhaps she was indeed privately consumed with shame and remorse, even though these are qualities not evinced in her behaviour – as revealed to the jury – in the months before or the hours after Stefanie's chillingly orchestrated killing.
But this is more likely only the projected sentiment of an observer; what ought to be the "normal" response over a life taken for ... nothing.
M.T. is not normal, not even within the shrill context of teenage melodrama and girl-on-girl spite. She has been, from plotting to murder to quasi-confession, a spectacle of morbid ambiguity.
On an adult, such emotional containment – sitting ever so quietly, unexpressive, just behind her lawyers – might be interpreted as stoicism. With a 17-year-old girl, it was simply evermore mystifying.
Who is she, M.T.?
What is she thinking?
Where does she direct the blame? There is nothing to suggest, even now, that she blames herself.
