A 19-year-old woman is accused of killing a 73-year-old man inside the downtown Kitchener apartment they had been sharing.
Megan Birtch appeared in court Friday after being arrested for second-degree murder.
Wearing a blue hoodie and pyjama pants, she said little and occasionally glanced up to look at family members sitting in the gallery.
Her brief appearance ended with her being remanded back into custody until her next appearance, which is scheduled for Oct. 25.
Birtch is accused of killing Bernard Gallant, a 73-year-old man known to his friends as “Pops.”
Gallant was found with serious injuries inside an apartment above a convenience store on King Street West in Kitchener Thursday afternoon. Friends say he had opened up his apartment to Birtch.
“If he saw you on the street and he thought you were struggling, he’d be the first person there to help you. He’d be the first person to do good by you,” Wendy Uebele, who was friends with Gallant and had met Birtch through him, said Friday.
“He was always thinking about everybody else. He never expected anything in return.”
Uebele said Gallant had recently reconnected with his children after being estranged from them for decades, and was thrilled to learn that they were doing well and that his son had children of his own.
“To know that he’d created those lives and they’d done so well made him proud,” she said.
Josh Gubesch worked with Gallant at a restaurant near his apartment.
“Pops was a nice guy. He was a friendly guy. He was like a brother to everyone,” Gubesch said.
Uebele said she didn’t know Birtch well, but knew that she seemed to be good with computers and found her to be “very quiet” whenever they were together.
“She had some troubles, and Pops tried to help her with that, and they grew to care about each other,” she said.
“I know that she genuinely cared about Pops. When they would hang out together, she would bring him little gifts.”
Birtch was not at the King Street apartment when police arrived. She was arrested later in the day in Waterloo.
Gallant’s cause of death has not been released publicly. A post-mortem examination had been scheduled to take place Friday.
With reporting by Nicole Lampa
