'That day is a blank:' Adele Sorella recalls nothing of her daughters' death, she tells jury
Accused killer tells jury she never tried to hurt anyone else in her 3 suicide attempts while girls were alive
Adele Sorella says she has very little memory of the day her two children died.
"That day is not my reality," she told the jury as she continued testimony in her own defence for a second day at her trial at the Laval courthouse for first-degree murder in the deaths of her daughters, Amanda, 9, and Sabrina, 8, in 2009.
Sorella, 52, told the six men and six women on the jury and Superior Court Justice Sophie Bourque her memories of Mar. 31, 2009 are foggy.
"I basically don't know what happened that day," she said. "A lot of it I've read or heard from other witnesses, and I tried to fill in the blanks."
She said she recalls being with her children that morning and saying goodbye to her mother as she left for an appointment.
After that, she told the jury she recalled being in her car, crashed in a ditch with several people around her.
Sorella told the court she has spent the time since the girls' deaths trying to piece together what happened.
"For me, that day is a blank," she said.
'I want to know what happened to my girls'
Her lawyer, Pierre Poupart, tried to get her to recall the events of the day before seeing her mother leave. Sorella said she remembered her daughters getting ready for school, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
She said she is still trying to find answers for that day.
"I want to know what happened to my girls," she said. "They were beautiful and loved life."
Sorella also responded to a written question from the jury, asking if she ever felt the need to hurt anyone else during her three suicide attempts prior to her daughters' deaths.
She replied she had never wanted to hurt anyone else. Sorella repeated what she said in her testimony Tuesday: she felt she was a nuisance and that her daughters were better off without her.
"I never tried to take anyone else with me," she said.
Poupart asked Sorella about a second hyperbaric chamber that had been delivered to her home. She testified Tuesday that her husband, Giuseppe De Vito, had paid for the chamber and had it delivered to the house while he was on the run from the law.
The family used a hyperbaric chamber to treat Sabrina's juvenile arthritis.
Sorella said she didn't see a need for the new chamber because the family already had one. She said her daughter's arthritis was also better and didn't need treatment with the chamber.
She said she didn't know how to use the machine and had never operated it.
Husband's flight 'was the straw that broke the camel's back'
In his cross-examination Wednesday afternoon, Crown prosecutor Simon Lapierre focused on Sorella's relationship with her husband Giuseppe (Joe) De Vito.
De Vito left the family home in 2006, evading police who had a warrant for his arrest on drug and organized-crime charges.
Lapierre asked Sorella how De Vito dealt with her when she suffered from what she called her mental illness.
"His reaction was I was being lazy and didn't want to take responsibility," she testified.
She said the two communicated often after he fled, mostly by text, through a BlackBerry he left at the house. However, they did see each other on three occasions, including a trip to the Laurentians at Christmas shortly after he fled, and another trip to Toronto in the spring of 2008.
Sorella told the prosecutor that those trips were organized through Nicolas De Vito, her husband's brother.
When asked about her first suicide attempt shortly after De Vito fled, Sorella told the Crown, "Joe leaving was the straw that broke the camel's back."
Lapierre also asked Sorella about the second hyperbaric chamber which De Vito bought while on the run, delivered by family friends.
Sorella reiterated that she couldn't understand why her husband sent it, because Sabrina's arthritis was under control. She said after he left, nobody used the hyperbaric chamber and that she never touched the new one and it was never in contact with her girls.
A key witness for the Crown previously testified that the girls suffocated in a closed environment, possibly in the hyperbaric chamber.
The jury also heard previously from a defence witness, chemist André Tremblay, who specializes in fibres and textiles, who said he did thorough tests on the clothes Sorella's daughters had been wearing when they were found to see if any of the clothing fibres were on the sheet, mattress or pillow inside the hyperbaric chamber.
He didn't find any, nor did he find traces of the fabric from the inside of the chamber on the girls' clothes.
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