CANADA
Nunatsiaq Online
DAVID MURPHY
Sometimes it’s hard just to walk through the courtroom door, let alone describe in detail the traumas of childhood.
Muttering profanities outside the door and then hiding her face inside a hoodie as she passed Eric Dejaeger — the man accused by dozen of witnesses of child sexual assault in Igloolik from 1978 to 1982 — the next in a long line of witnesses for the prosecution took the stand at the Nunavut Court of Justice Nov. 20.
Avoiding all eye contact, the woman, 36, sat down and looked left, away from Dejaeger and his lawyer, Malcolm Kempt.
“I don’t want to say his name,” she said when Crown prosecutor Doug Curliss asked who she worked for at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church in Igloolik.
Dejaeger, a Belgian-born Oblate missionary who became a Canadian citizen in the 1970s, has already served a five-year prison sentence imposed in 1990 after he was found guilty of sex crimes which occurred in Baker Lake between 1982 and 1989.
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