Man sentenced to 71/2 years in shooting death of single mother

STONY PLAIN Supporters of a young man who admitted to killing a woman in a rural Alberta farmhouse in 2014 sat in a small Stony Plain courtroom Tuesday as he was handed a seven-year sentence.

The man was 17 when he shot Roxanne Lang, 43, with a rifle inside her home on a farm near the hamlet of Rich Valley on July 4, 2014.

Now 20, the man’s identity remains protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

According to an agreed statement of facts, police responded to a 911 call from the home on the day of Lang ’s death. Officers found her body.

An autopsy later determined she’d been shot in the back with a .303 rifle from less than a metre away.

Investigators found no evidence of forced entry, robbery or that a struggle had occurred.

The accused was a high school student at the time of the offence, and he had no prior criminal record.

He was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and several other weapons offences on May 22, 2015. He confessed to the killing the following day.

Lang’s brother and sister-inlaw live in British Columbia and weren’t able to attend the sentencing hearing Tuesday but submitted victim impact statements to the court.

“I can make no sense of this crime. She was so young and taken from us brutally,” Lang’s brother, George Nelson, wrote.

Speaking to the Journal from his B.C. home, Nelson described his sister as a hardworking single mother of two.

Court also heard the accused had suffered “significant and protracted abuse” prior to the shooting and that his emotional development had been affected.

After being arrested, the man was admitted to the Alberta Hospital as a patient and spent the majority of his time prior to his sentencing receiving treatment.

He entered a guilty plea to second-degree murder in September 2016.

Crown prosecutors Scott Pittman and John Schmidt didn’t seek to have the man sentenced as an adult and made a joint submission with the man’s defence lawyer, John Sinclair, for a seven-year sentence.

Though the man is being sentenced as a youth, he will serve his sentence in an adult facility. Provincial court Judge Michael Savaryn recommended the sentence be served in the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre because the man’s grandmother is nearby.

With credit for time already served, the young man will remain in custody for just over two years.

Rich Valley is about 70 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.