Warning: This story contains graphic details
A teen girl who killed a stranger’s baby will serve an adult sentence, a Saskatoon Provincial Court judge has ruled.
Judge Sanjeev Anand delivered his decision, which was met in the courtroom with applause from the baby’s family and supporters, Tuesday afternoon. The teen will serve life in prison with no parole eligibility for seven years.
The teen killed six-week-old Nikosis Jace Cantre in July 2016. The baby’s mom, Alyssa Bird, found her son in his play pen badly beaten — bruised, bloody, swollen, scratched and gasping for air. He died of blunt force trauma to the head after the teen choked, punched, kicked and stabbed Nikosis with a metal nail.
The baby’s family had been asking for an adult sentence since the case began.
“In a way we got justice for him,” Nikosis’s grandfather, Jeffery Longman, said outside of court. “It’s very sad that we had to lose him in this way. A life sentence will never bring him back.”
The teen, who can’t be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, pleaded guilty in October 2016 to second-degree murder. The now 18-year-old was 16 at the time of the killing. Her identity will remain under a publication ban during a 30-day appeal period.
Anand said the killing was unsophisticated and brutal. He suggested the teen serve her sentence at the Regional Psychiatric Centre.
“My hope is that you will take advantage of any and all supports that are offered to you while you’re serving your time in custody,” Anand told the teen.
He said an adult sentence is appropriate, in part, because the Crown proved the teen’s immaturity and impulsiveness, which contributed to the killing, is not related to her age but her fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
“The consensus is that she will need lifelong care because she will not outgrow the impulsivity and immaturity associated with her FASD diagnosis,” the judge told court.
The teen sat in the prisoner’s box with her head down at the start of the proceedings, but was looking at Anand as he explained his decision.
The Crown demonstrated a youth sentence would not hold the teen accountable for what she did, he said, before addressing Nikosis’s family.
Applauding his decision may not have been appropriate, the judge said, but he understands the emotion of the family.
“You’ve been through a lot,” Anand said. “You have my deepest condolences and I hope that these proceedings will have some measure of closure.”
Crown prosecutor Jennifer Claxton-Vickzo argued for the adult life sentence, stating the teen is a threat to public safety and needs lifelong care and services, which isn't available with a youth sentence.
“She doesn’t want to be doing this again and she wasn’t sure if it would happen again,” Claxton-Viczo said Tuesday. “It (the life sentence) protects her and it protects us.”
Defence lawyer Brian Pfefferle said the teen didn’t appear disappointed or surprised with the judge’s decision.
“Her mental capacity was so diminished that getting a reaction from a verdict like this is even difficult,” he said.
The teen has no parental guidance, was adopted days after she was born and lived in a transient home with alcoholism and abuse, Pfefferle had told court.
The teen escaped while serving an open-custody sentence at Kilburn Hall in July 2016 and roamed the streets in Saskatoon looking for a place to stay. She told a woman she escaped from a group home in Prince Albert. The stranger gave her food, clothing and tried to take her to EGADZ, a youth centre, but it was closed, according to an agreed statement of facts.
The woman eventually took the teen to a home in the 200 block of Waterloo Crescent, where Nikosis and his family lived. The teen had never met anyone in the home prior, but they agreed to let her stay.
Pfefferle has said there’s no motive for the crime. The teen told a police officer after her arrest she was angry and took her anger out on the baby.
“I was sick and tired of life,” she said. “That’s why I hurt that baby and I killed it.”
Longman said now the family will pull together to heal as a group.
“Trying to wake up from this nightmare is never going to happen. It’s going to take me a while to heal.”
The sentence the teen received — life in prison with no parole eligibility for seven years — is automatic for second-degree murder offences, under Canada’s Criminal Code, for people sentenced as adults but who were 16 or 17 at the time of the crime. Her sentence also included a lifetime firearm ban.
CTV's Angelina Irinici was in court for the decision:
