Amelie Lemieux, right, is comforted by family members as she holds pictures of her two daughters, Romy and Norah Carpentier, at a memorial in Levis, Que. on July 13, 2020.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
A manhunt for the father of two girls found dead in a forest southwest of Quebec City entered its sixth day on Monday, as their mother delivered an anguished tribute to her beloved “princesses” and Quebeckers mourned the young children whose disappearance gripped the province.
Amélie Lemieux thanked Quebeckers for their support, along with those who are still investigating the deaths of her daughters.
“You are my whole life – my reason for existing,” she said, addressing six-year-old Romy and 11-year-old Norah, scarcely able to speak between sobs. “Be my stars in the night to guide me through this immeasurable pain.”
Ms. Lemieux was appearing at a news conference next to a memorial in the family’s hometown of Lévis, Que., where a mountain of stuffed animals and home photos attests to the province’s shared grief over the loss.
A teenager leaves a message at a memorial for Norah and Romy Carpentier, on July 12, 2020 in Levis, Que.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
“All of Quebec is crying with you today,” Premier François Legault tweeted Saturday.
A desperate search for the children ended Saturday when their bodies were found in a wooded area near the town of Saint-Apollinaire, Que. The discovery solves one mystery about their whereabouts, but leaves other unanswered questions about the location of their father and how they died.
The badly damaged car of their father, 44-year-old Martin Carpentier, had been discovered by the side of a local highway on Wednesday, just an hour after the last confirmed sighting of him and his daughters in a nearby convenience store. When the girls were reported missing, it launched the longest Amber Alert in Quebec history.
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About 80 provincial police officers continued to search the area’s dense forest for signs of Mr. Carpentier on Monday, along a stretch of road where “objects of interest” have been discovered, said Sûreté du Québec police spokeswoman Ann Mathieu.
The force’s deployment now includes helicopters, dog teams, members of the Canadian Armed Forces and even an equestrian squad, all contending with punishing heat and difficult terrain. They are prepared for a range of possibilities, including finding the suspect armed or dead himself.
Martin Carpentier, 44, is shown in an undated police handout photo.The Canadian Press
Mr. Carpentier had been a Scout leader in the area since September, 2019, while Norah was a Cub scout and Romy was expected to join the Beaver scouts soon, said Dominique Moncalis, spokesperson for l’Association des Scouts du Canada, in a statement. The organization is in “shock” and in “mourning,” the statement added.
Quebeckers have rallied to the family’s side by donating thousands of dollars to a GoFundMe page to help Ms. Lemieux, who is currently “living the worst nightmare of her life,” according to a post by the page’s organizer, Denis Lévesque. So far, the fundraising effort has reached more than $30,000 of its $50,000 goal.
Parents of distressed children have been seeking help in far greater numbers since the death of Norah and Romy, said Josée Masson, director-general of Deuil-Jeunesse, a Quebec non-profit designed to help children cope with grief and family separation. Calls to her staff have shot up, some from families who knew the girls, others from strangers.
“There are obviously many children who have been touched by this,” Ms. Masson said.
The outpouring of emotion has at times hindered the police investigation in unintended ways. On Saturday, about 100 ordinary citizens drove to the police perimeter to help search for Mr. Carpentier, but did more harm than good when many of them stormed into the forest at the sound of a cracking branch, contaminating the site for police dogs, Sgt. Mathieu said.
Another Quebec woman spread the false rumour on social media that Mr. Carpentier had been arrested. These actions ultimately “slow the investigation instead of speeding it up,” Sgt. Mathieu added. A more useful way of expressing solidarity with the pain of the girls’ surviving family is to search your own property in the area, she said.
The girls, who lived in Lévis, 18 kilometres southwest of Quebec City, were found roughly 26 km southwest of their home.
Police are searching near where the girls were found, and the manhunt is already difficult because of the density of the forest in that area, the heat and recent rainfall. “It’s a section that takes a lot of vigilance for the police,” Sgt. Mathieu said.
The girls were found lying within a short distance of each other, though not side by side, the Sûreté spokeswoman said.
What exactly happened last Wednesday – from the cause of the car wreck to the death of the girls to the flight of their father – remains unclear. Mr. Carpentier is considered a suspect in the deaths of Norah and Romy, but police are waiting for more information, including autopsy results, before pronouncing on his exact role in the tragedy. A desire to better understand what happened is one of the reasons the Sûreté still hopes to find the 44-year-old alive.
“Ultimately, it will be Martin Carpentier who will provide the key to all of these events,” Sgt. Mathieu said.
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