Court hears about mother’s horror at finding beaten baby boy
Alyssa Bird stood weeping in front of a Saskatoon judge as she listened to her cousin read a victim impact statement too difficult for Bird to read aloud.
It described the morning of July 3, 2016, when she found her son, six-week-old Nikosis Jace Cantre, naked in his crib. She said she had just come back inside from having a cigarette and saw a stranger leaving her son’s room.
Bird said she knew something was wrong when she went to check on the infant. His ears were bleeding, his face was swollen and he was covered in bruises, she wrote.
“He didn’t look the same. It was a nightmare and still is every time I think about it.”
Nikosis had just been viciously beaten by a 16-year-old runaway. A relative of Bird had found the girl wandering the streets and brought her back to the home on Waterloo Crescent because the girl had nowhere else to go, according to an agreed statement of facts presented in court.
Bird and the teen girl had never met.
Victim impact statements were presented on Thursday during the third day of the teen’s sentencing hearing in Saskatoon provincial court. On Friday, lawyers are expected to make final arguments to the judge, who will decide if the girl should be sentenced as a youth or an adult.
The now 18-year-old girl has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. She rocked back and forth in the prisoner’s box, crying into a bunched-up sweatshirt that she held to her face while listening to family members pour their hearts out to the court.
The Youth Criminal Justice Act prevents media from publishing the girl’s name because she was 16 years old when she committed the murder. She can be identified if she receives an adult sentence.
The girl has admitted strangling, punching and stomping baby Nikosis, who died from blunt force trauma to the head shortly after the beating. She said she was angry and took it out on the baby after hearing him crying in a room.
Court heard the teen has a history of violence and prior assault convictions.
Experts have diagnosed the girl as having Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and concluded that she requires lifelong, 24-hour supervision, according to an FASD report filed at the hearing.
“Although the hope is that she can benefit from programming now that she has been properly diagnosed, the general view is that her behaviour is only modified by her environment and not as a result of anything she is capable of learning through programming,” defence lawyer Brian Pfefferle summarized.