PHILIPSBURG–The Joint Court of Justice found Nikerson Boireau guilty of manslaughter and upheld his twelve-year prison sentence. The verdict of the Joint Court of Justice confirmed the ruling handed down by the Court of First Instance of St. Maarten on June 17, 2015.
Boireau was accused of strangling a toddler entrusted to him by his girlfriend on August 27, 2014. The sentence was in accordance with the punishment the Solicitor General had requested for the suspect.
Boireau had taken the child’s lifeless body to the Emergency Room at St. Maarten Medical Center (SMMC) around 2:30pm that day. According to medical doctors, the child was already dead when he was brought in and attempts at resuscitation proved futile. The child’s heart had stopped, he had stopped breathing and his pupils were no longer responding.
Paediatrician Dr. Pieter Offringa deemed the circumstances under which the child was brought to the hospital suspicious, which led him to file a report with the Prosecutor’s Office. The child’s mother, who had been in a relationship with Boireau since May 2014, said she had left her child with him while she had gone to work, as there had been no health issue. Only a few hours later, Boireau took the child to hospital from his home in Cole Bay as, according to him, the toddler was suffering from convulsions.
Experts at the Netherlands Forensic Institute arrived at the conclusion that the child had been killed by manual strangulation. Several bruises were found in the soft tissue surrounding the child’s left neck artery. These conclusions were supported by the Department of Forensic Medicine of Leuven University in Belgium.
Boireau also had stated that the child was healthy that day. “He was acting normal. There was no one else home during the time D’Jahneiro was at my home that day,” he had said.
All this led the Court to the conclusion that Boireau had been responsible for the child’s death by strangulation.
Source: The Daily Herald https://www.thedailyherald.sx/islands/61207-boireau-s-12-year-sentence-stands-says-the-joint-court
View comments
Hide comments