Accused killer angry, jealous after moving from Africa: sponsor

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This article was published 30/03/2017 (3141 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An Eritrean man accused of killing his wife months after the couple settled in Winnipeg had become jealous and quick to anger, the victim’s brother testified Thursday at the second-degree murder trial of Teklu Mebrahtu.

Mebrahtu is on trial in the death of his wife, 34-year-old Alche Kidane, who was found dead in the couple’s home in January 2012. The criminal case has stretched on for more than five years largely because questions have been raised about the accused’s mental health.

Mebrahtu told police and 911 dispatchers he killed his wife, but his defence lawyers are arguing he didn’t have the criminal intent necessary to be convicted of murder because of a mental disorder. They’re expected to ask for a not-criminally-responsible designation.

Degol Abay sponsored his sister and her husband to come to Winnipeg, but he said he hadn’t met Mebrahtu at that point and wasn’t sure he was coming until he picked up the couple at the airport.

They were married in Sudan and arrived in Canada in August 2011, moving into Abay’s bachelor apartment.

A couple of months went by, Abay said, and he noticed Mebrahtu would become jealous and angry when he talked to his sister. Abay moved out of the apartment, but his sister continued to tell him about her husband’s concerning behaviour. She told him Mebrahtu “was not happy” to give her money, that he got upset at least once when she wanted to go out without him, and that he had slapped her.

Another time, Abay said, she told him Mebrahtu had picked up a knife. He had been complaining about people following him, Abay said.

“I wanted to take him to the police many times, but the neighbours put me in the wrong position; they discouraged me,” Abay testified Thursday in the Tigrinya language, with the aid of a translator. “I used to fear that he would cause some accident,” he said.

He said the couple’s neighbours were aware Mebrahtu was “disturbing” Kidane and her brother, but Abay said they told him he was better off taking Mebrahtu to a hospital rather than calling police. Abay did take him to see a doctor in hopes he’d be referred to a psychologist. The trial is expected to hear from medical professionals today.

Abay said he believed his sister loved Mebrahtu and wouldn’t try to hurt him.

“It’s because she loved him that she married him and brought him here,” he said.

A former friend of Mebrahtu’s testified earlier this week that he believed his wife was trying to poision him or that she was conspiring with other people he believed were following him.

The trial heard Abay and his sister had enlisted help from an English-speaking neighbour to call 911 and report Mebrahtu’s behaviour. The neighbour phoned 911 in the early afternoon on Dec. 15, 2011.

Officers weren’t dispatched to the couple’s Assiniboine Avenue apartment until around 10:30 a.m. the next day. By the time they arrived just before 11 a.m., the neighbour who had offered to translate for them wasn’t home. Neither was Mebrahtu.

Police spoke with a woman they believed was Kidane, but she didn’t speak English and “there was nothing that stood out as a cause for concern at that time,” one of the responding officers, Const. Dawn McCaskill, testified Thursday.

Police were able to ascertain only that the woman was from Eritrea, so they went back to their cruiser and tried to connect with a translator. When they returned to the apartment later, McCaskill testified, no one answered the door.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

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