The lawsuit seeks $36,000 in damages, including funeral costs and $5,000 annually for raising each of the girls.
SPRINGFIELD — The guardian of two sisters whose mother was murdered in Hampden in 2010 is suing the landlord of the home where the slaying unfolded for funeral expenses and costs related to raising the girls.
Gina M. O’Neill, the sister of the late Valerie Girouard, who was stabbed multiple times by her daughter’s ex-boyfriend in her home at 90 Main St., is suing Mary Haarmann, owner of the house.
The lawsuit seeks $36,000 in damages, including funeral costs and $5,000 annually for raising each of the girls.
Valerie Girouard Girouard, 47, was killed in her kitchen by Jesus Gilberto Garcia, 20, her older daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Testimony at trial showed Garcia broke into the house through a basement window with plans to rape the girl, but was surprised by Girouard instead. He stabbed her with a kitchen knife.
Also gravely injured that night was Kurt Haarmann, Girouard’s live-in boyfriend and son of the 86-year-old homeowner.
“He slit my son’s throat and stabbed him in the back. He still has pain,” said Mary Haarmann, reached at the home she now shares with her son.
The wrongful death lawsuit alleges that Mary Haarmann knew Garcia posed a threat to the tenants because the man had broken in nine days before the attacks, but failed to secure the house. Mary Haarman denies this.
“That’s false. I didn’t know nothing about him breaking in before. They never went to the police about it,” she said. " I only heard it when the case went to trial."
She added that she did not live there with her son at the time.
The lawsuit echoes testimony from the trial in 2011, when Garcia was convicted and sentenced to life behind bars. Witnesses testified that Garcia initially broke in the house wearing a mask on July 21, 2010, and held a gun to 15-year-old Mariah Girouard’s neck. No one was harmed and the teen shamed Garcia into leaving, according to testimony.
Jesus Garcia is shown here in Hampden Superior Court as the verdict came in in his murder trial; he was convicted of stabbing to death Valerie Girouard, the 47-year-old mother of his ex-girlfriend and attacking Girouard's boyfriend, Kurt Haarmann. However, when he rode his bike 7½ miles from Springfield to the house in Hampden in the middle of the night nine days later, it was a tragically different story.
Haarmann told jurors at trial that he saw Garcia stabbing Valerie Girouard repeatedly as she lay prone on the kitchen floor. Haarmann was stabbed in the back three times as he tried to flee. Mariah Girouard was not injured and her younger sister was not home at the time.
The lawsuit contends Mary Haarman should have known to better secure the house, and that liability standards for residential homeowners are even higher than those who house commercial tenants – i.e. a hotel.
“He was an obvious threat," plaintiff’s lawyer Daniel M. Kelly said of Garcia. “I didn’t want to drag the kids through this when they were young, but now they’re a bit older. And they have been left with nothing. Their mother didn’t have life insurance; they have nothing.”