‘He was hurting her’: Girl tried to protect mom

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This article was published 20/10/2022 (1442 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A seven-year-old girl rushed to her mother’s aid as she was being stabbed to death, only to have the attacker turn the knife on her, a Winnipeg courtroom heard Wednesday.

“He was hurting her and I kept on trying to tell him to stop,” the now-10-year-old girl testified.

Monica Chippeway, 35, died following a frenzied attack inside her Lake Manitoba First Nation home on March 26, 2020.

Phoenix Maytwayashing, 22, Chippeway’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, is on trial for second-degree murder.

Chippeway’s daughter held an eagle’s feather and was accompanied by a victim support worker as she testified from behind a screen that shielded her from the sight of the accused.

Court has heard Maytwayashing visited Chippeway’s house three times the day she was killed. Maytwayashing arrived the first time with a bottle of wine and Chippeway turned him away. He returned sometime later with a bag of groceries and was turned away again.

“The third time he came to her house he stabbed her 32 times,” Crown attorney Danielle Simard told King’s Bench Justice Herbert Rempel in an opening address Monday.

In an interview video recorded a month after the killing and played in court Wednesday, Chippeway’s daughter said she was in her bedroom when she heard her mother scream. The girl said she ran out of her room to see Maytwayashing “holding a knife and hurting her.”

The girl said she came between her mother and Maytwayashing when she was slashed on her ear, chest and arm.

“Before he was nice,” she said. “I don’t know why he did it.”

The girl said she ran shoeless out of the house to her grandparents’ home, where her father arrived a short time later and called police.

In the interview video, an RCMP investigator praised the girl for her quick actions.

“You did a very brave thing trying to stop him from hurting your mom,” the officer said. “Everything you did was the right thing to do. Nothing you could have done would have changed what happened.”

The girl told court Wednesday she didn’t know she had been injured when she ran out of the house. “I was too shocked… I was trying to help my mom.”

Under cross examination by defence lawyer Matt Gould, the girl testified she had a good relationship with Maytwayashing prior to the killing and played games with him or watched movies together during his previous visits to the house.

Under cross examination, the girl confirmed telling family members she believed Maytwayashing was drunk or high when he arrived at the house.

“He didn’t look normal at all,” she said.

On Tuesday, a man who was staying in the same house as Maytwayashing at the time of the killing told court they and two other men had been drinking at home that afternoon, after a day running errands in nearby Ste. Rose du Lac.

“Phoenix said he was going to see Monica,” Jeffrey Williams (also Chippeway’s cousin) told court. “The first time he left, he brought a bottle of wine. He seemed normal.”

Maytwayashing returned about 15 minutes later, gathered up some groceries and left again, Williams said.

“The second time he came back he was… drenched in blood,” he said. “It was on his face, on his arms. It was running down his hands.”

Maytwayashing “kept on telling us he had ‘f—ed up’ and told us all to get out of the house,” Williams said.

The trial resumes Friday, and is scheduled for two weeks.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca