Father was ‘always happy… helping everybody’

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This article was published 02/09/2011 (5464 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

She’s 22 weeks pregnant and planning her father’s funeral.

Those are large hurdles for any 19-year-old, but even tougher because they come a week after Emily Anne Lalonde-Harper watched her father be fatally beaten with a baseball bat.

She said her father, Joseph Lalonde, 48, died because he tried to protect her from attackers near their home in the North End on Aug. 24.

Now, the teenager plans to raise her orphaned 14-year-old brother and 16-year-old sister, as well as the child she is carrying.

“My dad was happy it was a boy. He wanted a boy,” said Lalonde-Harper about the unborn baby who would have been her father’s first grandchild. During an interview on Thursday, she still bore bruises on her wrist and a black mark on her forehead from the fight eight days earlier.

The trouble leading to the single father’s death began after two teenaged boys argued with a group of people outside the 400 block of Dufferin Avenue, police said.

The teens returned soon after with a baseball bat, and got into a fight with Lalonde-Harper even though she and her father hadn’t been involved in the earlier conflict.

“They asked me what kind of gang I’m in,” she said. “I didn’t say anything. I just told them to leave, I’m not in no gang, nothing. I don’t like gangs.”

She said her father jumped in to help her after two teens came up to her and one hit her on the neck. “That’s when I started screaming. My dad jumps in telling them to leave me alone because I was pregnant. That’s when they went after him,” said Lalonde-Harper.

She said her father —- who’d already suffered brain damage in previous beatings — tried swinging “whatever he had” at the attackers, but it wasn’t enough.

“I saw my Dad on the ground, doing nothing, and that guy kept banging, kept hitting him in the face with the bat,” she said.

He died at hospital early Tuesday, six days after the beating.

Lalonde-Harper said she wants her father remembered as someone who was “always happy,” and who “tried helping everybody as best as he could.”

Two 15-year-old boys have been charged with second-degree murder. They are jailed at the Manitoba Youth Centre.

gabrielle.giroday@freepress.mb.ca