Beating described as lesson

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This article was published 12/05/2022 (1253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jesse Gamblin attacked 28-year-old Norma Andrews with a baseball bat and a machete to teach her a fatal lesson about what happens to “rats,” a court heard Tuesday.

“It was a lesson that would begin in full view of others and end in Norma Andrews’s death,” Crown attorney Chantal Boutin told Queen’s Bench Justice Brenda Keyser at the opening of Gamblin’s second-degree murder trial.

Andrews bled to death following a prolonged and brutal attack at a Balmoral Street rooming house on Sept. 21, 2019.

Court heard Andrews, known to her friends as Bambi, was asleep on a bed after a night of drinking and using drugs with several other people in the suite when, the Crown alleges, Gamblin, 22, returned around 9 a.m. and attacked her.

“The accused jumped on the bed, grabbed and assaulted Bambi with his hands, stating: ‘Rats deserve to die,’” Boutin said.

Gamblin allegedly dragged Andrews to the entrance of the suite where he beat her with a baseball bat as two occupants of the suite fled.

As another female suite occupant looked on, Gamblin “switched from a bat to a machete,” Boutin said. The female occupant ran out of the suite and waited in the hall “until she heard Bambi’s final and dying sounds.”

“Shortly after that, the accused emerged from the suite and told her words to the effect: ‘Finally, it’s over,’” Boutin alleged.

Gamblin allegedly left the rooming house and returned with cleaning supplies “in an attempt to clean up what he had done,” but did not finish before police and paramedics responded to a 911 call late that afternoon, Boutin said.

The trial will hear testimony from the female witness “who will provide you a first-hand account of what she heard, saw and felt the moments before, during and after the killing,” Boutin told Keyser.

The trial is set for three weeks.

At the time he was arrested for killing Andrews, Gamblin was on bail for another machete attack on a female friend as she slept.

Court heard at a May 2019 bail hearing Gamblin was high on methamphetamine when he picked up a machete and attacked a friend who had at times offered him refuge.

The assault only ended after the victim escaped through a broken bedroom window. She suffered 10 stab wounds to her chest, torso, hands and pelvis, requiring 20 staples and five stitches.

Gamblin was convicted of aggravated assault in October 2020 and sentenced to four years in prison.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca