Alain Bellefeuille guilty of first-degree murder in death of OPP officer
The jury also found him guilty of second-degree murder.
Article content
Angry and armed with a rifle, Alain Bellefeuille not only knew the police were outside his home, but lay in wait and hunted them down seconds after they walked in his front door for a wellness check turned deadly on May 11, 2023.
The police knocked at the back of his home, shone flashlights, turned cruiser lights on outside and announced themselves as they entered the unlocked door to his small home in normally quiet Bourget, a village around 50 kilometres east of Ottawa.
Recommended Videos
tap here to see other videos from our team.
Alain Bellefeuille guilty of first-degree murder in death of OPP officer Back to video
tap here to see other videos from our team.
Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Eric Mueller was shot multiple times below the waist. While he was bleeding out on the floor, a menacing Bellefeuille 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—ed 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 by a ricochet in the leg 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 story and on May 24, after just more than one day of deliberations, found Bellefeuille guilty of one count of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder. He stood statue-still when the foreperson read the verdicts and sat quietly when his victims’ families read moving impact statements.
Kathy Mueller said her brother was a natural at police work and, later, fatherhood. Family life fulfilled him.
“Endlessly devoted and leading with quiet strength,” she told court.
She said Eric Mueller had never been happier. Then came May 11, 2023, a day she recalls with “unbearable clarity.” The early morning call from her mother, screaming that Eric had been killed. Her body went numb.
Then the nightmare began. “My world collapsed.”
They were close. They grew up in a small Quebec town, were close to nature, built forts and played outdoors until sundown.
She addressed her brother’s killer in court, saying, “You didn’t just take away a police officer that night,” but also destroyed a family and shook a community.
“It paused life as we knew it.”
She had a planned trip to visit her brother later that month, and on that day there would be no hug or cheeky smile, just his lifeless body in a casket, she recalled.
She said the trial felt like her brother’s second funeral, and it had “broken us all over again.”
“Trying to make sense out of the senseless.”
The trial ran for eight weeks and the horrifying bodycam video that captured the killing 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.
Kathy Mueller said she found it hard to escape the horror of how Eric had died. She was so proud of her brother and what he had become, and now her family was left with the heart-wrenching reality of navigating life without him.
Their mother, Ginette Mueller, also addressed court on Saturday and reminded everyone her son died in a most horrible way simply because he wanted to help. Died in the line of duty.
“It stole a part of my heart that will never heal,” she said.
She said her son was an admirable father and so happy to share his life with his “beautiful sweetheart” wife, Marie-France Ethier.
“His presence was always reassuring and full of love.”
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 cruelest 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.
The doomed 911 call came in just after 2 a.m. on May 11, 2023. A next-door neighbour thought she heard a gunshot and feared Alain Bellefeuille had killed himself, and saying he was sad about getting evicted at the end of the month.
Three OPP officers responded, and after Lauzon spoke to the neighbour, he went next door, and then Mueller pulled his vehicle into the yard.
Together they approached the front door, then went around back, knocked on the back door, Bellefeuille’s window. In all, they knocked 64 times. Then they returned to the front door, and only then, when Lauzon walked in did he announce “Police. Police.”
Mueller’s pistol never left its holster.
He was gunned down on a wellness call and bled to death on a mudroom floor. Lauzon was downed by bullets, but managed to get up, his body vest still smoking from impact. The wounded Lauzon pressed his back against a wall, his firearm aimed at Bellefeuille’s bedroom door.
Slowly, the nose of Bellefeuille’s rifle poked out of his bedroom door, then disappeared. The wounded Lauzon fired a few rounds into the bedroom. One bullet hit a wall, the other a dresser drawer. Then he retreated from the house and collapsed in the yard.
In closing remarks last week, Tansey told the jury Bellefeuille was “the image of a hunter pursuing his prey,” saying he knew exactly who was outside and that they certainly weren’t intruders, but rather OPP officers with “POLICE” emblazoned on their uniforms.
“He knows they’re police and he’s going to show them they picked the wrong guy,” Tansey told the jury.
She presented Bellefeuille as callous and angry — punctuated with his cruel words to the dying officer.
She told the jury to reject the killer’s cover story of panic and self-defence and the notion that he didn’t know he was shooting at police.
It didn’t take long for the jury to side with the Crown, and, while all conversations in the jury room are secret under Canadian law, we know there was tension 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.
Pelletier discharged that juror. Another juror was also discharged after receiving 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 judge thanked the jury for their attention and patience during the trial.
Bellefeuille declined the opportunity to address the court before he was condemned to life in prison for first-degree murder.
That means he won’t be eligible for parole for 25 years. On the two counts of attempted murder, Bellefeuille was sentenced to 20 years for each, concurrently.
Our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark our homepage and sign up for our newsletters so we can keep you informed.
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.