Strangers all, they stopped to see if they could help the two women who lay bleeding on Bathurst St.
The Good Samaritans who testified at Godfrey Sig-Od’s murder trial Wednesday were spurred by the most noble of human emotions — in such sharp contrast to the man they say confessed to the brutal stabbings of his ex-wife and daughter on that summer afternoon and offered a motive that is hard to fathom to this day.
It was Aug. 26, 2022 and Zackary Mandel, 27, was driving north on his way home from a construction job site when he pulled over after spotting two ladies lying on the ground. “I saw multiple stab wounds on both of them,” he told the jury. “I stopped to help, but I also had a broken arm, so I was limited in what I could do.”
Mandel said he saw a man throw something over the fence by a guardrail, and then drop to his knees and cry over the body of the older of the two women. And that’s when he said he heard him utter the chilling words: “I killed her because she cheated on me.”
“I heard that loud and clear,” he told the jury.
Sig-Od, 48, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of his ex-wife Elvie Sig-Od, 44, and their daughter Angelica, 20. His offer to plead guilty to manslaughter was rejected by the Crown, which maintains the killings were planned and deliberate.
Elder care worker Soula Berdoussis, 60, was in a company van heading south to Bathurst and Sheppard Ave. to pick up a client when the traffic stopped near the Jewish Community Centre. People on the northbound side had left their vehicles and were milling about on the roadway, she said, and an oddly angled SUV was stopped in the southbound side with three of its wheels on the sidewalk.
She assumed it was an accident, though there was no sign of a second car.
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She didn’t like to be late for her elderly client, so she started honking as she slowly moved forward. “And then I saw bodies,” Berdoussis said, “so I stopped in front of the one body that was on the road.”
She had to help. “I’m the type that I get involved, and I got out.”
One person was lying on the sidewalk while the other was on Bathurst right in front of her van. Asked if anyone had called 911, people told her they were on hold with the operator. She saw blood coming from the victim’s head on the road and was considering taking off her top to apply pressure to the wound because she didn’t have anything else in her van.
“I got to the body and I looked at her face and she had marks on her face. And to me, it didn’t look like an accident.”
The female victim, with “gouges” on her face, seemed to be taking a breath, so Berdoussis went and bent down to her. That’s when she said a man came and hovered over her. Without looking up, she told him this wasn’t an accident and demanded to know what happened.
“And then the person above me, the male that I could hear his voice… said to me, ‘I killed her because she cheated.’”
Berdoussis recalled her shock.
“I said, ‘What?!’ He killed her because she cheated?”
Berdoussis said she assumed he was confessing to killing the woman and the other body must be her male lover. Time suddenly stood still. She slowly looked up, past the man’s black shoes, his long pants. “And then I look at his hands. I thought, ‘This is where I die. He just said he killed these people,” she recalled.
“My whole life flashed in front of me. There goes my son, he doesn’t have a mother…”
Berdoussis ordered him not to move — and he didn’t. Finally, she heard the police sirens approaching. She leaned in the window of the first scout car that arrived and told the officer that he’d just confessed: “I killed her because she cheated.”
And when she looked over the hood of the police car, Berdoussis could see the man’s hands outstretched in front of him, waiting for the inevitable handcuffs.
The trial continues.