Alain Bellefeuille,
sentenced to life in prison
for killing an OPP officer in a 2023 wellness check turned deadly, has filed for leave to appeal his conviction and sentence.
Bellefeuille filed the handwritten appeal from the Ottawa jail, where he awaits transfer to a federal prison for
killing Sgt. Eric Mueller
.
Belllefeuille took the stand in his own defence and said he thought it was a home invasion, and shot blindly through his bedroom walls to thwart the intruders.
Only they were police, who had knocked multiple times at the back door and window and front door, and shone flashlights inside, but never announced themselves until they entered his unlocked front door.
Mueller, known as a police leader and family man, was gunned down within seconds of entering the home in normally quiet Bourget, a village around 50 kilometres east of Ottawa.
He was shot multiple times below the waist. The killing was captured on the dying officer’s bodycam.
In the haunting video, the killer was seen leaning closely over the dying officer, only to say, “You f—-d with the wrong motherf—-r, should never have broken into my house.”
They may have been the last words the dying officer heard.
Const. Marc Lauzon was also hit multiple times in the first volley of gunfire, but survived life-altering injuries. Another responding officer who retreated was hit in the leg by a ricochet as he took cover by the cruisers.
Bellefeuille has long claimed he thought they were intruders and
took the stand in his own defence
at trial.
But the jury didn’t buy
his self-defence story
and convicted him in May. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole eligibility for 25 years.
The trial ran for eight weeks, and the horrifying bodycam video was played again and again and again.
The audio is unsettling, as the officer is heard asking for help and moaning in raw, agonizing pain.
In his handwritten leave to appeal, Bellefeuille lists three grounds: “Error in law by judge, unreasonable verdict by jury, and conflict with jury during entire trial.”
The grounds are not detailed and the notice to seek leave to appeal is essentially a placeholder until a lawyer takes on his appeal case.
While all conversations in the jury room are secret under Canadian law, we know there was conflict in the room, at least for the first four weeks of trial.
That was because one juror was considered a bully by some fellow jurors. They felt bullied and intimidated to the point where they no longer wanted to express themselves for fear of being attacked verbally.
The judge discharged that juror. Another juror was also discharged after getting an OPP escort to the courthouse because they had slept in and were late for court. On optics alone, the judge said, he couldn’t imagine the public would think it was reasonable for a juror to have a police escort in a case where the victims were fellow OPP officers.
The killer declined the opportunity to address the court before he was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.
The cop-killer case was successfully prosecuted by Assistant Crown Attorneys Louise Tansey, François Dulude and Emma Loignon-Giroux.
After the convictions, Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Pelletier noted: “It is the cruellest irony that the victims were there to offer assistance, doing what they do: protect us all without protection themselves in this case.”
The judge said the case was “the absolute fear of anyone’s nightmare” and said he hoped family, friends and colleagues would continue to find the courage to deal with the awful events.
