Grieving mom testifies at trial of man accused in ex-girlfriend’s heroin death

Article content

Cynthia Beer woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of her granddaughter crying.

Article content

Article content

Her first reaction was that it was “very strange” because the three-year-old slept in the same room as her mother, Beer’s daughter Deborah, 28.

The little girl “was her world,” she said, and any other time Deborah would have been awake, consoling her daughter.

Wednesday, at the manslaughter trial of Joshua Biernacki, 32, Beer said she went into the bedroom, picked up her granddaughter and looked for Deborah on her bed.

Article content

Then she looked to her left. Deborah, who had a long history of drug addiction, was slumped in the closet on her knees, facing away from her mother. Beer said she “kind of shook her and nothing happened.”

She pulled on the back of her daughter’s shirt. “And that’s when I seen my daughter was blue.”

And, she said, she had a memory of a needle sticking out of her daughter’s arm. She said through questions from assistant Crown attorney Roger Dietrich that she thought her daughter had been clean for five years.

Deborah died of a heroin overdose on Nov. 6, 2020, at their shared apartment at Adelaide Street North and Commissioners Road. Biernacki, her one-time, long-time boyfriend, is charged with manslaughter and drug trafficking.

The Crown is seeking to prove Biernacki sold the heroin that killed her. A jury is hearing the Superior Court trial over the next two weeks.

It was clear from the moment Beer entered the witness box that she was still very much grieving the loss of her daughter. At times, her tears flowed freely and she asked Justice Michael Carnegie a couple times for a brief recess to pull herself together.

Article content

Article content

She told the story of her daughter’s troubled life. Deborah, she explained, had been a drug addict since she was 14 when they spent Deborah’s teen years living in Oshawa. Around the same time and when she was already in the throes of addiction, she began a relationship with Biernacki, which lasted on-and-off for nine years.

“It was a very toxic relationship,” she said during cross-examination by Biernacki defence lawyer Sevag Yeghoyan.

Her daughter had periods of sobriety, but would often relapse, and overdosed twice. Beer said she moved to London in 2016 and Deborah, who was pregnant, joined her. The baby was not Biernacki’s.

Child welfare services became involved and Deborah was made aware she could only keep her baby if she kept herself clean of drugs. Deborah didn’t relapse during her pregnancy and was in counselling to keep her life together. She stayed on a year-long methadone program for 11 months, ending the therapy when she believed she was clean. And she began a job at Tim Hortons.

Beer said her daughter never did drugs around her, but was very open about her struggles. “Deborah was very honest with me about drug use. She just didn’t do it in front of me.”

Article content

She did see her and Biernacki shooting up once in a bedroom closet, she said.

Beer described her relationship with her daughter as “excellent.” She never checked Deborah’s phone messages or searched her room for drug paraphernalia.

She agreed when asked by Yeghoyan that Deborah had been in drug treatment in Oshawa. “I had to put her in Pinewood (rehabilitation centre in Oshawa) physically myself,” she said. “Deborah chose to never speak about Pinewood.”

And she said her daughter didn’t talk much about Biernacki, who at one time lived with them in Oshawa, once they moved to London. Beer said he never visited their apartment and she never saw him in the city.

What she did see was her daughter dead in the middle of the night four years ago. She said, through questions, she whisked her granddaughter out of the room and called 911.

“I told them I needed an ambulance because I believed my daughter was dead because she was blue,” Beer said.

She was told to try CPR while waiting for the ambulance. Beer said she didn’t do it. “I kept screaming at them, ‘she’s dead.’”

The trial continues Wednesday afternoon.

jsims@postmedia.com

Article content