The younger sister of a 22-year-old man tried for the first-degree murder of her mother, Rae Cara Carrington, identified her brother as the person seen in the security video stabbing Carrington to death, a jury heard. on Monday.
“I grew up with him. I always knew what he is like,” said the young woman, who cannot be identified due to the publication ban. “That’s him.”
While testifying, he tried to look around a computer monitor on the witness stand to make eye contact with his brother, Duncan Sinclair.
During the trial, Sinclair’s attorney, Joelle Klein, has attempted to suggest that the Crown cannot prove that Sinclair was captured on security video showing a young man stabbing Carrington, 51, at Fast Fresh Foods in the PATH Downtown Toronto subway at night on April 20, 2019.
The woman, one of eight siblings, testified Monday about growing up in an abusive home dominated by her father, Paul Sinclair, and how the children turned on their mother.
The family was constantly on the move and hiding from the police and social services, and none of the children attended school or visited doctors or dentists. They were not allowed to leave the house, except sometimes on weekends, when some of the children accompanied their mother to run errands. Most of the children and both parents used false names instead of their legal names, just in case someone noticed something wrong and “reported” them to the police, he said.
The young woman testified that Paul Sinclair did not allow her and her siblings to attend school because he did not want them to be “corrupted and brainwashed.” I’d say the teachers were pedophiles and rapists, so I was protecting the kids by keeping them at home. Now he believes that he did not want the teachers to see marks on them from being beaten.
While his mother worked long hours to earn enough to support the family, handing over her salary to her husband or eldest son to control, Paul Sinclair “homeschooled” the children. But, the woman testified, there was no formal apprenticeship. She and her siblings only learned to read at the age of 10 or 11. She began reading by following the captions on television and after her father told her to read the Bible or she would go to hell, she testified.
When the brothers turned 16, they were sent to work whatever job they could find. They would give their paychecks to their father to use to pay rent and household expenses.
He said he had no relationship with his mother, who mostly worked outside the home. His father also constantly tried to turn the children against their mother, he testified. He often said that she was cheating on him and that one of the brothers was not her biological son.
Even talking to Carrington would be seen as a betrayal of his father, so for two years he did not even speak to his mother, he said.
He saw her as a stranger, just a woman who worked and bought food for the house, he said.
“He didn’t really have a relationship with her. I felt like she was never there for me, ”he said, and would reject any attempts his mother made to establish a relationship. She said Duncan Sinclair felt the same: that “she never took care of us, she was not a good mother.”
He recalled that his mother had nervous breakdowns and panic attacks after arguing with his father. She would say that she hated being married to him and wished she had never met him.
“She would have nightmares in which my father hurt her,” said the young woman. Then he would wake up and walk around the kitchen, gasping for air and saying things like, “I can’t breathe, I can’t do this.”
One of the girl’s older brothers eventually fled the house and “the leash tightened,” she said. His father was paranoid, the brother would give them away and they moved to a new place that his brother did not know. He said that if his mother spoke to that brother again, he would kill her, he testified.
Meanwhile, the woman said that she had been battling depression for years since she was 11 years old.
In February 2018, her father demanded that she make her mother feel bad for spending money on a new pair of shoes and she refused. He got mad, he said, and “it became too much for me.”
He recalled seeing a suicide hotline posted on the subway while going to work, but couldn’t remember the number, so he called 911 to ask for the number. Instead, the dispatcher sent police officers and a psychiatric nurse to his location, though he tried to keep them from coming and hung up the phone.
When the police arrived, he waited by the door to try to convince them not to enter the apartment.
“I tried to make them believe that everything was fine and that I was not suicidal,” he said, but they insisted that he open the door and let them speak to one of his parents.
His father spoke politely to the officers and told them to leave. The family moved out of the apartment shortly after and began staying in motels. The jury heard that the police contacted the Children’s Aid Society about concerns about the filth of the children and the apartment, but when they went to visit the family he was gone.
After weeks of staying in motels, his father had his older brother buy a secluded property north of Toronto and moved there with Carrington and the three younger children. The young woman, Duncan Sinclair and her older brother remained in Toronto to continue working.
In May 2018, the woman was able to reconnect with the brother who left through Facebook and, with his help, she got in touch with a Children’s Aid Society social worker. In July of that year, she arranged to be placed in a foster home so that she could start going to school. He did not consult his parents or his other siblings before leaving.
She was concerned because she did not know where her younger siblings were and she knew that her father had physically hurt her and her siblings. He also wanted them to be able to go to school and have freedom, he said.
Police eventually located Paul Sinclair and the younger siblings were placed in foster care.
“I was delighted,” she said. “It was the best news I have ever received.”
Not only were they safe and protected from their father now, but they received Christmas gifts and started going to school, which they hated at first and then loved, he said.
Carrington left Paul Sinclair in early 2019 and began living in a women’s shelter. Sinclair was charged with crimes related to child and domestic abuse, although Duncan Sinclair and his older brother refused to participate in the criminal case and did not see themselves as victims of abuse, Det. Sheri Plunkett testified last week.
Carrington was working at the sandwich shop to save enough money for an apartment and hoped to regain custody of her three minor children from foster care, the young woman testified.
The Crown argues that Duncan Sinclair, who had sided with his father, killed his mother to prevent her from gaining custody of his younger siblings.
The young woman testified that she was initially skeptical that her mother would regain custody of her siblings, fearing that she would return to her father and it would be as if nothing would change. Over time, he came to believe that his mother’s efforts were genuine, but their own relationship remained strained.
The young woman said Duncan Sinclair had a supervised meeting with his younger siblings on April 13, 2019, three days after Carrington’s murder.
The jury has heard that Paul Sinclair was convicted of various charges, including assault and forced confinement.
The trial continues.
Reference-www.thestar.com