He claims his wife made him do it.
Fugitive killer Henry Morales has admitted strangling his wife Malena on July 11, 2006 in their Brampton apartment but wants a jury to find that she drove him to the deadly deed.
During his two-week trial, jurors have heard that after killing the 31-year-old mother of his children, Morales took their two young sons to play mini golf and then fled to Mexico where he remained in hiding until his arrest 14 years later.
In her closing address, defence lawyer Karen Symes told the Brampton jury that Morales didn’t intend to kill his wife of 13 years. But if they believe the intention was there, she asked them to find Malena provoked her husband — and that makes him guilty of manslaughter, but not second-degree murder.
Testifying in his own defence, Morales claimed Malena slapped him during an argument over money and told him he disgusted her, she was leaving him for another man and taking away his sons.
The next thing he remembers is his hands around her throat, court heard.
“He felt his whole life was a lie. He snapped. He lost control of himself. He attacked her. He strangled her,” Symes told them.
The forensic pathologist told the court Malena died of manual strangulation and also had five broken ribs, a gash above her eyebrow and evidence of blunt force trauma to her head that could be consistent with punches or kicks.
Morales insisted he couldn’t remember any of his attack, but agreed he “must have” inflicted the horrific injuries.
“What happened that evening happened in a flash, a flash of emotion, a flash of anger,” his lawyer argued. “And it is that flash of anger that leads us to the law of provocation and how it applies in this case.”
It’s a partial defence to murder “out of compassion for human frailty,” Symes explained. “Anger can overwhelm a person, anger can cause a person to lose self-control.”
They would have to find Morales reacted illegally “but understandably to a sudden, wrongful act or insult.”
But Symes reassured the jury that the provocation defence doesn’t blame the victim for their own death. “It does not mean you are concluding that Malena Morales is a bad person; it does not mean that Malena was responsible for what Henry did to her.”
That rang hollow for Crown attorney Darilynn Allison, who insisted this wasn’t provocation, but an intentional killing.
Morales was sufficiently in control, she said, to calmly call out to his 11-year-old son Henry Jr. not to come into the bedroom after his mom screamed and begged him three times to help her.
And if Morales didn’t intend to kill Malena, the first thing he would have done was call 911 when he realized what he’d done, Allison continued.
The Crown accused Morales of lying about the entire deadly encounter, including his “fake memory loss,” and his clear recitation of why he was supposedly provoked into strangling her.
Malena didn’t slap him — she was too afraid of what he’d done to her in the past, including a choking incident five months earlier — and she didn’t insult him and threaten to take his children, Allison said.
But even if she had, nothing Malena said would have come as a “sudden” shock or cause an ordinary person to lose self-control, the prosecutor argued. Despite claiming their relationship was great at the time, Morales knew they were headed for divorce and just the night before she was killed, their son testified, Malena was so afraid that she ran into her sons’ room, looking for protection during another argument.
“This marriage was already in the toilet and about to be flushed,” the prosecutor said. “That tells you that Mr. Morales could not have been shocked that his wife was leaving him.”
And when he told his son not to come into the room where his mother was being beaten and choked to death, that shows a “person in control and a person with intent,” Allison said,
“Mr. Morales decided in that bedroom to kill his wife,” she concluded. “This murder was not sudden, it was tragically inevitable. And the killing of Malena Morales was second-degree murder.”
The jury is expected to begin deliberating Friday after the judge completes her legal instructions to them.
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