Prosecutor Steve Baribeau says in his closing arguments that a suicide letter found when Vincent tried to kill himself in 2020 is key evidence in the trial.
A man charged with second-degree murder, accused of killing a motorist on Highway 50 while trying to kill himself in a head-on collision, provided the key evidence against him in a letter he wrote months later, a prosecutor argued at the St-Jérôme courthouse on Wednesday.
Jano Vincent, 37, of St-Polycarpe, is charged with killing Robert Campion on Oct. 6, 2019. Vincent was driving his Ford F-150 along the highway, just north of Hawkesbury, Ont., when the vehicle swerved into an oncoming lane and struck a recreational vehicle driven by Campion.
The victim died on impact while Vincent suffered injuries that left him in a coma. The Crown’s theory of the case is that Vincent deliberately crashed into Campion’s vehicle to commit suicide. On Tuesday, Vincent’s defence lawyer argued the crash was the result of an accident and Vincent testified at trial that he has no memory of the collision.
Prosecutor Steve Baribeau told the jury hearing the trial that the key to the Crown’s case was a letter Vincent wrote the summer after Campion died and just before he tried to commit suicide a second time by swallowing pills. Baribeau referred to the document as a “suicide letter” and argued one paragraph in particular served as an admission that he was trying to kill himself when his pickup truck collided with Campion’s vehicle.
“Now I am handicapped because of you because I wanted to end my shitty life that you made me live,” Vincent wrote in the letter. It was an apparent reference to how Vincent’s parents sold him a house that turned out to have several problems. The matter was part of a civil suit that had dragged out in court for years before Campion was killed. In the letter, Vincent referred to the property as “a house full of surprises.”
“He never thought this letter would end up in the hands of the police,” Baribeau said, adding Vincent likely assumed he would be dead before anyone read it. “What can be more reliable than that?”
The letter was found by Vincent’s former girlfriend in a book that was on his kitchen table.
“He was in exactly the same place (in 2020) as he was (on OCt. 6, 2019),” Baribeau said. “He was in the same place because he was taken with the same problems.”