Warning: This story contains graphic content
A teen guilty in the death of a six-week-old baby rocked back and forth, sobbing and covering her ears in a Saskatoon Provincial Court prisoner’s box Wednesday as she watched a video of herself describing the killing.
The details of how she killed Nikosis Jace Cantre were so graphic many of the baby’s family members left the courtroom crying and the judge ordered a break.
The video showed the teen explaining, in great detail, how she choked, punched, kicked and stabbed Nikosis in the early morning hours of July 3, 2016. She described how she forced a nail into the infant’s cheek, how she kicked him three times in the head.
“I was holding that baby, rocking him like a mom,” she said in the video. She was in the room for about five minutes before she beat him. “I just started choking him and punching his head in.”
The teen told the police officer in the video, which was recorded just over a week after the baby’s death, she took all 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.”
The teen, who was 16 at the time and can’t be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, had escaped from Kilburn Hall in Saskatoon one day prior to the baby’s death. She was serving a 10-month open custody sentence for a number of offences, including assault with a weapon, robbery with a weapon, assault, arson, and break and enter.
She explained in the video how she wandered the streets, asking people for a place to sleep. She said she smoked a joint that may have been laced with meth and eventually made her way to Nikosis’s family’s home, where she drank alcohol. The family has said they invited the teen into their Waterloo Crescent home after meeting her downtown. They did not know her, but said they elected to help her out.
She didn’t intend to kill the baby, she told police
“I didn’t mean to do it. I just did it,” she said.
She also told police her adoptive parents are dead and she is not in contact with her birth parents.
She described her behaviour of assaulting staff and lighting fires while spending time in youth facilities and group homes. She said she was depressed and missed her family the night she escaped from Kilburn Hall.
When the officer asked if she wanted to say anything to the baby’s family, she apologized.
“I just regret it so badly,” she said.
Her sentencing hearing will determine if she’ll be sentenced as a youth or an adult.
The maximum youth sentence for second-degree murder is four years in custody, followed by three years supervised in the community. An adult sentence for second-degree murder for someone who was 16 or 17 at the time of the crime includes life in prison with no chance of parole for seven years.
The hearing is scheduled to resume Tuesday.
