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MANDEL: Judge to decide if daughter guilty in elderly mom's death in Toronto
The Crown argued she owed her 96-year-old mother a duty of care and shouldn't have left her on the dirty floor for more than two days
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Any decent, reasonable human being would have known that leaving a frail 96-year-old woman on the floor of her filthy home for more than two days was endangering her life.
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Her only daughter, entrusted with her care, should have known most of all.
MANDEL: Judge to decide if daughter guilty in elderly mom's death in Toronto Back to video
Yet once again, Eva Samonas told her trial in Toronto that her mom Visiliki Atanasovski actually liked to sit on the floor and she didn’t want to go against her wishes and call an ambulance.
“She wanted to stay there,” insisted the woman’s 73-year-old daughter before the judge weighs her fate. “She kept saying, ‘Leave me alone.’
That Samonas didn’t appreciate the risk, said Crown attorney Christine Jenkins, “is completely unbelievable and objectively impossible.”
Accused representing herself at her judge-alone trial
Samonas is representing herself at her judge-alone trial where she’s pleaded not guilty to manslaughter, criminal negligence causing death and failing to provide the necessaries of life.
In closing arguments Friday, she told Superior Court Justice Jane Kelly it was difficult caring for her mom in her final years as the long-time hoarder slipped further into dementia.
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“It got to the point that she locked me out,” recalled Samonas, fighting back tears. “She wasn’t letting me in at all. I had to break the window pane to get in and then when I got in, she hit me with a stick. She says, ‘You’re going to take my stuff. You’re going to take my stuff.’ This is what I’ve been going through.”
And you can sympathize – but nothing can excuse how she left her mom to deteriorate to near death until finally calling an ambulance on Jan. 6, 2024.
Daughter on trial for manslaughter in death of 96-year-old Toronto mom
MANDEL: Toronto woman accused of manslaughter testifies she left mom on floor for days
In her closing argument, the prosecutor said she didn’t doubt Samonas loved her mother very much but she had a duty to ignore her mom’s irrational fears about going to the hospital and get her the help she so obviously needed.
“Her mother depended on her and she had a responsibility to make decisions for her mother when she could not make them herself,” Jenkins said.
Atanasovski died from complications of “prolonged immobility” while suffering from a blood clot and heart disease.
Court heard she had a large open wound on the small of her back and sepsis from exposure to E-coli from feces; the horrific bed sore had eaten down to the bone and an officer testified he could smell rotting flesh when he went to photograph her injuries at Michael Garron Hospital just before she died.
Samonas explained her mother had “slipped” off the sofa on Jan. 4 and she couldn’t lift her. With her mom’s legs wedged under the coffee table, she couldn’t put on a diaper, so she placed an absorbent pad under her naked bottom.
Over the next few days, she asked her brother, a neighbour and a family friend to help lift Atanasovski.
All told her to call an ambulance.
Instead, the Crown argued, she left her mother to remain on the floor in her own waste to abide by her wishes not to die in the hospital.
“Every hour that went by was a further departure from what a reasonable person would do in these circumstances,” the Crown said.
When Samonas noticed her mother was failing – her arm was cold and she wasn’t eating or speaking – her daughter finally called 911. And still she said it really wasn’t an emergency.
Paramedics found Atanasovski, covered in urine and feces, suffering from a decaying bed sore to her back in a dirty Broadview Ave. house crammed to the rafters.
But Samonas insisted there were no feces, she didn’t see a wound and the home wasn’t as bad as described.
The prosecutor said that can’t be true and the autopsy photos stand as a “powerful contradiction” to Samonas’s evidence.
“They show a serious, life-threatening, vivid, grotesque gaping wound that covers the small of her mother’s back,” Jenkins charged.
“By claiming to have not seen the development of these injuries, the flies, the feces, the urine and the true state of that house or smelled the odours coming out of her mother’s body, Ms. Samonis, from the Crown’s perspective, was attempting to distance herself from the dire circumstances and her own culpability.”
Doesn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the accusations against her
Lawyer Aaron Wine, asked by the court to assist the self-represented Samonas, argued on her behalf that she wasn’t a health professional and couldn’t have known the seriousness of her mom’s condition.
“She wasn’t leaving her mother on the floor to die. She left her mother on the floor because it was normal for her,” he said.
But even now, the daughter doesn’t seem to grasp the gravity of what she’s accused to have done.
“Being 96 years old, even if she went to the hospital,” Samonas said in her final appeal to the judge, “would she have survived?”
Kelly is expected to deliver her verdict next month.
mmandel@postmedia.com
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