Grace Robotti is on trial for second-degree murder in Kelowna Supreme Court.
(ADAM PROSKIW / iNFOnews.ca)
March 28, 2017 - 12:17 PM
KELOWNA – The doctor who conducted the autopsy on Roxanne Louie found bruises, cuts and abrasions consistent with someone trying to protect themselves from an attack.
Dr. James Stephen called them “defensive” injuries.
“When someone is being struck they may assume a posture to protect their face or head or eyes. This exposes certain parts of their body to the blows they are protecting themselves from,” he said in Kelowna Supreme Court today, March 28.
Injuries that could be called defensive, he says, were found on Louie’s hands and forearms but the rest of Louie’s body was virtually covered in marks as well. Some of them, in particular a “yellow, leathery abrasion” on her right thigh, likely occurred after her death.
“Without blood pressure a scrape of the skin does not result in bleeding. It tends to have a yellow appearance.”
Dr. Stephen is just one of the more than a dozen witnesses called to testify in the second-degree murder trial of Grace Robotti, the 65-year-old great-grandmother from Penticton who admits she killed her grandson’s ex-girlfriend with 26 strikes to the head with a metal bar in January 2015.
While she admits Louie died at the hands of her and her brother Pier Robotti, she denies it was intentional and says it happened during an early morning fight.
She has pleaded guilty to interfering with a dead body for a frantic cleanup undertaken that morning and for helping her brother get rid of the body. Robotti also filed a false missing person report following the death and lied to police on multiple occasions to try and cover her tracks.
The trial is expected to continue until mid-April.
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