Murderer of stepson jailed for a minimum 16 years
Justin Kuijer sentenced for death of Nathan Dumas, 7
It was low-key ending to a highprofile crime that garnered national attention.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Stephen Glithero sentenced Justin Kuijer, 44, to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for 16 years for the second-degree murder of his stepson, sevenyear-old Nathan Dumas.
Glithero gave the court a dispassionate breakdown of the facts that influenced the sentence.
Kuijer sat staring straight ahead without displaying any sign of emotion for the entire hearing. Asked by the judge Tuesday if he wanted to address the court, Kuijer declined.
“The whole point of the guilty plea was remorse,” said St. Catharines attorney Scott Reid, who represented Kuijer. “Had there not been any remorse there wouldn’t have been a guilty plea. That is always the case with any guilty plea. I know he certainly wishes he could take back that day.”
Whitney Dumas, his former girlfriend and the mother of Nathan, sat five rows behind him surrounded by her family. She spent the hearing fighting back tears.
Dumas and her father declined a chance to comment on the sentence or Kuijer’s guilty plea.
Glithero also sentenced Kuijer
to 4½ years concurrently for an aggravated assault on a bank employee that occurred on the same day he strangled Nathan.
Last week, the atmosphere in the courtroom was far different. The court heard a series of gutwrenching victim-impact statements from Dumas, her parents and the bank employee Kuijer stabbed with a letter opener.
“In a situation like that, the victim-impact statements are always tough to hear,” Reid said. “You have families baring their souls and pouring out their hearts in a public space.”
Crown attorney Tom Jacobs asked the judge to impose a sentence that wouldn’t allow Kuijer to apply for parole for 18 years. Reid wanted Kuijer’s parole eligibility set at 14 or 15 years.
On March 17, 2017, emergency crews were called to a secondstorey apartment on Queenston Street in St. Catharines after Whitney Dumas found her son unconscious in his bed, a belt from a bathrobe tied around his neck.
Paramedics rushed the Grade 2 Harriet Tubman Elementary School student to local hospital before he was transferred to McMaster General Hospital in Hamilton. Nathan died the following day.
Dumas was in the process of ending her relationship with Kuijer. The couple had been together for more than five years, and he is the biological father of her two younger children.
Less than 20 minutes after Dumas called 911, Niagara Regional Police were dispatched to a Royal Bank branch on Martindale Road.
Kuijer had walked up to a 49year-old bank employee and stabbed her in the neck area with a metal letter opener.
The bank had recently turned down Kuijer’s application for a mortgage after the construction business he owned failed.
Police launched a nationwide manhunt after Kuijer fled in Dumas’s van.
The search ended five days later after a member of the public called 911 to report a man matching Kuijer’s description was sitting in a van in a parking lot in Kenora, near the Manitoba border.
Inside the van was a 68-page journal in which Kuijer confessed his crimes. The journal proved to be a critical piece of evidence for the Crown.
“It had a number of admissions and set out precisely what he was thinking at the time,” Reid said.