Life sentence for 88 fatal stab wounds
Judge accepts joint sentencing submission by Crown and defence
A Calgary man was sentenced Friday to life in prison, with no chance of parole for 15 years, for the stabbing death of an acupuncturist he suspected was having an affair with his wife.
In a joint submission between the Crown and defence, Jin Qing Huang admitted to stabbing Tiejun Huang 88 times with two knives on June 16, 2016, at the victim’s Perpetual Wellness Chinese Medicine Centre at 16th Avenue and Centre Street N.W.
It brought a second-degree murder conviction, though Huang was initially charged with first-degree murder.
In handing down a sentence agreed to by both Crown and defence, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Keith Yamauchi said the savageness of the crime couldn’t be overestimated.
“There are very few words that could describe the severity of the offence — shocking, vicious, cruel,” he said.
“There is a high moral blameworthiness.”
In an agreed statement of facts, the accused Huang, who’s not related to his victim, went to the clinic with two knives from his home carried in a laptop computer bag.
His wife, Yujuan Liang, was on one of the clinic’s beds receiving treatment when Jin Qing Huang, now 44, approached acupuncturist Huang, accusing him of having a sexual relationship with his spouse.
“You’re having an affair with my wife,” he said to Huang after being told of his wife’s presence.
He then began stabbing Tiejun Huang, 51, eventually using both knives during a struggle in which the victim attempted to ward off the blows with both hands.
“The tip of one of the knives broke off in the skull of the deceased during the attack,” says the statement read in court by Crown prosecutor Trevor Fik.
“The second knife was found after the attack lodged in the abdomen of the deceased, with only the handle visible.”
One knife blade measured 19 centimetres in length; the other, nine centimetres.
An employee from a nearby restaurant in the Central Landmark Mall then arrived and began performing CPR on a dying Tiejun Huang, with Jin Qing Huang moving aside to sit a few feet away.
A police officer who arrived on the scene said “the defendant was covered in blood and looked like he was in shock,” stated Fik.
He didn’t resist when he was forced to the ground and arrested, noted Fik, and told the officer, “I did it, I did it.”
As details of the murder were translated by a Cantonese interpreter, Huang hung his head in the prisoner’s box, then wept.
During a preliminary inquiry in May 2017, his wife Liang testified she wasn’t having an affair with her acupuncturist and that the dead man’s last words to her husband moments before the stabbing echoed that.
When accused earlier by her husband that she was having an affair, Liang denied it.
“He told me that and I explained to him and he still did not believe me, therefore I brought up the issue of divorce,” she told the inquiry.
She said her husband experienced mood swings following a car accident four months before the stabbing.
Defence lawyer Adriano Iovinelli said Huang had found religious faith while in lockup and had been baptized there.
He also said his client had suffered from depression prior to the crime, though emphasized it doesn’t excuse it.