In the early morning hours of Aug. 8, 2009, the owner of a modest mobile home in Crestview awoke to see her live-in boyfriend stumbling toward her, clutching his chest and gasping for help.

"It took me a while to wrap my head around what was happening with him,” the woman told a youth court judge yesterday, on the second day of her 17 year-old daughter's murder trial.

Several hours earlier, the woman had passed out on the couch, as she often did, after drinking wine for much of the night.

"I went toward him and I don't know if I moved his arms or if he moved his arms, but I saw that he was bleeding,” she said. "He may have said: ‘She stabbed me.'”

The mother, who cannot be named to protect the identity of her daughter, started frantically searching for one of the household's three cordless handsets. Each one she found was dead.

By this time, her 56-year-old boyfriend was leaning out the front window, screaming for help.

"I'm trying, I'm trying,” the woman remembered saying. "Then I thought to go and see if I could find a neighbour that was awake.”

She ran down the street in her flip-flops until she saw the light of a television shining out of a nearby house.

The woman inside handed the mother a cell phone. When she got through to 911, the operator said the ambulance was already on its way.

The mother ran back to her house, where she found her son on the living room floor, trying to help her wounded boyfriend.

Yesterday, the court heard from the son and his friend, who testified they received a hysterical call from the accused saying she had stabbed the boyfriend.

As she came into the house, the mother said she remembered her son's friend passing her a cell phone, saying ‘It's (your daughter).'”

The girl was "frantic, hysterical” her mother testified. "At some point in the conversation she said: ‘I did it, I finally did it.'

"... I took it to mean she had done something to (my boyfriend) – like it was the final straw.”

There was no physical violence or sexual abuse going on in the home, according to the mother and brother, but every witness in and close to the family has described the boyfriend as a surly and unwelcome member of the household.

When he first came to live at the house in 2005, he was a "gregarious, charismatic guy,” the mother said, but that soon changed. The man quit his job and never got another – he rarely contributed any money for food or other expenses. He stopped helping around the house and became more and more sedentary, spending most of his time sitting in an armchair in the living room, smoking, drinking beer and watching TV.

The children got more and more unhappy and resentful, she told the court. They asked her to kick him out, but every time she tried, he would simply ignore her, or say he was leaving but never take any steps to actually go.

"I knew it was bad,” she said of having the man in the house. "It was a pretty negative influence.”

The house was in need of repairs, something her boyfriend had promised to help with but never did. Her daughter's bedroom door had been hanging off its hinges for more than a year – it no longer closed properly.

He was passive aggressive, the mother said, and would twist people's words around to draw them into circular arguments.

"It's subtle so you kind of get sucked into it before you know where it's going,” the mother said of her boyfriend's habit of constantly picking at people's weak spots.

"He wouldn't call people names, it was more insidious than that,” she said. "I would define it as mentally or emotionally abusive.”

She also talked about her own role in the household, admitting she is an alcoholic who regularly comes home from the bar half drunk, then continues to drink through dinner and often passes out on the couch.

She said she did not know how to deal with the situation at home.

"Is it fair to say you were caught up in what was going on between you and (your boyfriend) and you didn't notice what was going on with the kids?” defence lawyer Fia Jampolsky asked during cross-examination.

"Yes,” the mother replied.

She said she noticed her daughter was "very unhappy” but that her boyfriend's depression and disengagement overshadowed many of the other emotions in the house.

While cross-examining a number of the prosecution's witnesses, the teenaged girl's lawyers have brought up the fact that she sucks her thumb in order to fall asleep, and that she always sleeps with an old baby blanket. The relevance of those points has not been explained to the court.

The accused is not expected to take the stand this week, as her lawyer, Gordon Coffin, wants the psychiatrist who assessed her after the killing to be present when she does.

Due to a misunderstanding in pretrial communications, he thought the court had arranged for the doctor to be in town this week, but learned on the first day of trial that he was supposed to subpoena that witness.

Judge John Faulkner is presiding over the trial, which resumed today.