Murder suspect tried to sleep during police interrogation after man killed in his apartment
If Chad Pinel is guilty of anything, it is at least very bad manners.
Pinel, 22, and his younger brother Jayden, 19, are on trial before a jury at the Montreal courthouse, charged with the second-degree murder of 27-year-old Conor Patrick O’Loughlin. The victim was stabbed to death during the early morning hours of May 18, 2024, inside his apartment building in the Sud-Ouest borough.
At the start of the trial, both of the bothers entered not guilty pleas to the sole count each faces.
On Wednesday, the jury watched a video recording of Chad Pinel’s interrogation by a Montreal police detective the day after O’Loughlin was killed.
The murder suspect appeared to have been pulled from a deep slumber when he was arrested.
He squinted often, tried to fall asleep on a small table in front of him in the interrogation room and flat out denied that he or his brother stabbed the victim.
He also broke several basic social etiquette rules during the 98-minute interrogation. He picked his nose often — first while the homicide investigator left him alone in the room to get Pinel a cup of water and later right in front of his interrogator. He also slouched often in the small metal chair he sat in, pulled a blanket he requested over his head and chewed with his mouth open and made loud noises while he ate food the investigator offered him. He also talked while his mouth was full.
The Crown’s theory of the case is that the brothers were partying with two young women who lived on the first floor of the apartment building at 3600 St-Antoine St. W. Their apartment was close to where O’Loughlin lived.
O’Loughlin came home with two friends he had been partying with and heard loud music coming from the women’s apartment. For reasons that are unclear, O’Loughlin knocked on his neighbour’s door, had a brief conversation with the Pinel brothers that appeared to be amicable and returned to his apartment.
When prosecutor Philippe Vallières-Roland made his opening statement to the jury, he said that, after O’Loughlin returned to his place, the brothers went over and a fight broke out, during which the victim was fatally stabbed.
During his interrogation, Chad Pinel admitted there was an altercation, but he denied several times that either he or his brother had a knife.
“I had nothing,” Pinel said when the homicide investigator asked how O’Loughlin ended up with deep wounds that caused him to lose more than two litres of blood. “Not me and not my brother — for sure.”
Pinel said he entered into the altercation when someone “sucker punched” his brother and he reacted by trying to protect his sibling. He said there was pushing and shoving and then he and his brother returned to the young women’s apartment.
“I think that what I did was right. It was crazy, tabarnac,” he said. “I did the best thing I could.”
Minutes later, he conceded that O’Loughlin’s death was “sad,” but he then laid his head on the table in front of him and appeared to try to sleep, ignoring some of the investigator’s questions.
“So, besides that,” the investigator asked sarcastically after a long period of silence.
“Us? We didn’t do s–t,” Pinel responded, sounding grumpy.
“Someone died,” the investigator said.
“I know,” Pinel shot back.
Pinel described the altercation as very quick and very confusing to him. He said that, at one point, there were as many as five people standing at the entrance to O’Loughlin’s apartment and his instinct was to pull his younger brother away from it.
When he was asked if the stabbing was perhaps an accident, Pinel suggested the possibility that one of the people with O’Loughlin that night was holding a knife and that the victim backed into it.
He also denied that, after he and his brother returned to the women’s apartment, he told one of them that he and his brother had killed someone.
The trial will resume on Thursday.
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