The father and stepmother of Brampton teenager Tiffany Gayle, facing murder charges in connection with the girl's death, appeared in court Wednesday for a bail hearing.
They were remanded in custody.
Outside, one woman said: "It is sad for a child to die. Why does a child have to die?"
The woman is the mother of a four-year-old boy who is a half-brother to Tiffany.
Paramedics, then police, were called to the Gayle family's residence on Saturday. On Monday, they declared the girl's death to be a homicide, and announced the arrest of her father and stepmother the next day.
The duo had turned themselves into police.
Gayle, who had recently arrived from Jamaica to be with her father Frederick Gayle, 42, and two siblings, died of what police are calling blunt-force trauma.
The mother of Tiffany's half-brother told reporters: "I need to know the facts of what happened. I just never seen any kind of aggression." She claimed Frederick was a good father to her child.
Donald McLeod, lawyer for stepmother Elizabeth Gayle, 43, said his client is grieving.
"It is clear that this is a tragic incident, whether you look at it from one perspective or the other," he told reporters outside the Brampton courthouse.
A woman who identified herself as a cousin of Elizabeth Gayle said there were no signs of trouble in the home. She expressed her condolences to Tiffany's mother in Jamaica.
CTV Toronto's Austin Delaney said some members of the Gayles' church came to the courthouse to, as they put it, try and make sense of what happened.
No allegations against the two accused have been proven in a court of law.
With a report from CTV Toronto's Austin Delaney
