‘I took what must have meant the entire world to you’: teenage killer apologizes to victim’s mother in court

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This article was published 25/06/2018 (2279 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Taking a few deep breaths, the 17 year old stood in the prisoner’s dock to apologize for taking the life of 19-year-old Serena McKay.

She had looked into the eyes of McKay’s mother and father, seeing nothing but pain and hatred there, she said.

“I have yet to experience what it feels like to be a mom without a daughter, to have a precious life I’ve created taken from me,” the teen began.

“I took what must have meant the entire world to you, Serena’s gifted and blessed life,” she continued, reading aloud from a handwritten letter addressed to Serena’s mother, Delores Daniels, who sat across the room with a framed portrait of her daughter.

“Through all the pain and suffering I’ve caused for you and Serena’s father, I can never be at peace with myself knowing what I’ve done.”

The teen can’t be named under a provision of the Youth Criminal Act. She was 16 when she and a then-17-year-old girl punched and kicked McKay, their high school classmate, after a house party on Sagkeeng First Nation in the early morning hours of April 23, 2017. McKay’s body wasn’t discovered until about 19 hours later, long after her two attackers had gone back inside and locked the door. Helpless from 67 blows to her head and body, she likely froze to death after hypothermia had taken hold.

The teen awaits a judge’s decision on whether she’ll be sentenced as an adult for manslaughter. Her co-accused was sentenced earlier this month to the maximum seven-year youth sentence for second-degree murder. But the younger teen didn’t plead guilty to murder, her defence lawyer James Wood argued Tuesday, because she was blackout drunk during the beating, so she couldn’t have had the mental intent that’s legally required for murder.

“It was not (her) intention to kill Miss McKay,” he said.

The teen’s defence team of Wood and lawyer Serena Ehrmantraut is asking provincial court Judge Lindy Choy to sentence the teen to three years, the maximum allowed for manslaughter under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. They’re recommending she serve her sentence under the Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision program — an option available for young offenders who need additional treatment within the correctional system. It would mean the teen would spend another two years in custody, where she’s been since she turned herself in to police the day after McKay’s body was found.

The deadly beating began after McKay argued with the now-17-year-old about alcohol — something the teen had long been using to cope with the trauma of being sexually assaulted several times when she was younger. When she told her mother about the abuse, she was shamed, so she turned to alcohol.

“This addiction stemmed largely from the fact that she suffered numerous sexual assaults as a young girl,” Wood told court.

After the beating, the teen initially said she didn’t know where the still-missing McKay was before asking her co-accused to tell people the fight wasn’t that bad. At that point, she didn’t know McKay was dead, Wood said.

“So to say that this is adult-like behaviour, trying to cover up a crime, is inaccurate,” he said. “She wasn’t trying to cover up.” The co-accused and her boyfriend visited another party guest and asked him to lie to police to make it seem like they had already left the party before the beating began.

But videos of the beating, recorded and shared on social media by the co-accused, told a different story. In one clip, the younger teen can be heard shouting at her co-accused to take over the beating. Another clip shows the co-accused’s boot stomping on McKay’s head.

There’s no doubt, Wood said, that the videos are “horrific” and that what happened that night was a tragedy.

“The death had a far-reaching impact, but the court must not consider only those impacts,” he said, urging the judge to impose a youth sentence that would, he argued, give the teen more access to rehabilitative programs than are available in the adult correctional system.

“We respectfully submit that an adult sentence in these circumstances is completely inappropriate,” Wood said.

Like McKay, who moved in with family friends in Pine Falls for her final year of high school, the teen was relatively new to the area.

She had been sent to live with her father’s family in Sagkeeng after her aunt died about a year before the beating. She’d been raised by her mother in Alberta, but her mother was having trouble coping with the death of her sister, court heard. While the school principal described the teen as “couch surfing” in a report that was filed in court, Wood said she was just “trying to find a place to fit in and settle.”

She was struggling, Wood argued, with being separated from her mother and was later diagnosed with substance-abuse disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Speaking in court Monday, Daniels referenced Gladue sentencing principles, which require courts to consider an Indigenous offender’s background, and suggested the teen should not receive a lesser sentence because of it.

“We all have Gladue (factors),” she said.

In her letter, the teen wrote she despises herself every day thinking of McKay’s death and “for letting it get that far.”

“My life is changed forever but your life now has a missing piece to it, and I want to take responsibility because I can’t bring her back so you can complete the empty space in your heart,” she wrote.

Choy is expected to deliver her decision in August.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay