P.E.I. man gets life for revenge killings
Innocent man and his son were executed
Alfred Vuozzo was driving his family home to Montague, P.E.I., on a Thursday night in 1970. On the sparse country road from Murray River to Montague, there is an intersection partially hidden behind a patch of trees.
At that intersection on Nov. 19, 1970, a truck collided with Vuozzo’s panel van, sending his nine-yearold daughter Cathy through the windshield.
She died instantly, according to newspaper clippings stored on microfilm in the University of Prince Edward Island archives.
They buried Cathy on the following Sunday in the cemetery at St. Mary’s Church in Montague. Her father spent time in hospital for cuts and shock. Her brother, Alfred Jr., then two, was shaken by the crash, but not injured.
Over the next four decades, however, the little boy grew into a “cold-hearted and calculated individual” bent on avenging his sister’s death, a Crown attorney said Monday.
The man who drove the truck that collided with the Vuozzo family, Herbert McGuigan, has since died, the Eastern Graphic P.E.I. media outlet reported. So last year Alfred Guy Vuozzo, 46, went to the McGuigan household less than five kilometres away from the old crash site with a handgun and shot the driver’s son and grandson “execution-style” instead.
“It was revenge,” prosecutor John Diamond said Monday during a sentencing hearing at the provincial Supreme Court in Charlottetown.
Alfred Guy Vuozzo pleaded guilty to first- and seconddegree murder for the August 2014 shooting deaths of 68-year-old Brent McGuigan and his son, 39-year-old Brendon McGuigan, himself a father of three children.
The killings were among the worst in the province’s history, Diamond said, adding that Vuozzo murdered the McGuigans knowing they had no direct connection to the accident other than being related to the driver.
On Monday, Vuozzo was sentenced to life in prison, with no parole eligibility for 35 years. The Crown had argued that Vuozzo shouldn’t be eligible for 50 years, while the defence sought 25 years before he could apply for parole.
Before he was sentenced, Vuozzo addressed the court. He said he has been tormented since Brent McGuigan’s father received a ninemonth sentence for the crash that killed his sister — a sentence that remained unconfirmed, Monday.
“That’s all her life was worth,” said Vuozzo. “She only had nine years in this world. And nobody cared. It’s haunted me all my life.”
More than a dozen victim impact statements were submitted with the court.
In one of them, Brent McGuigan’s only daughter, Donna, said she has become consumed with hatred as a result of the killings.
“I feel so much anger and hatred that it scares me,” she told the court, sobbing. “I hate that they died this way and it haunts me.”
Marie McGuigan, Brent’s widow and Brendon’s mother, said her life has changed. “I pray to God every day for strength,” said Marie, who discovered the gruesome scene. “I will never be the same. ... A part of me died with them that night.”
There were several emotional outbursts in the courtroom, including one that led to a man being ejected from the public gallery.
After the sentencing decision was read, Vuozzo cursed and screamed, resisting the officers as he was taken from the courtroom while members of the public cried and yelled back at him.
“You’ve sentenced me to life and I sent them to death,” Vuozzo yelled, according to CBC News.
The murders rocked the rural community outside Charlottetown, where the phone book lists dozens of McGuigans and Vuozzos — none of whom wished to speak on Monday.
Vuozzo, who reportedly lived with his mother not far from St. Mary’s Church, suffered from depression for years, the court heard.
Father Gerard Chaisson is the priest for both the Vuozzo’s St. Mary’s parish in Montague and the McGuigan’s St. Paul’s in nearby Sturgeon. “We know everybody in each of the parishes,” he said. “I visited with both families and I’m telling you it was very difficult to go and be with them.”
“I will never be the same. ... A part of me died with them that night.”
MARIE MCGUIGAN