Judge weighs bail for boy who killed brother

Family wants Dorval youth, 13, out for Christmas as he awaits sentencing

A young Dorval teenager who has been in detention for close to a year for fatally shooting his older brother will find out Wednesday whether he’ll be let out on bail in time for the Christmas holidays.

Judge Guy Lecompte of the Court of Quebec Youth Division heard arguments Monday both for and against the 13-year-old’s release in antici- pation of sentencing in late January or early February.

The teenager pleaded guilty in September to criminal negligence in his 16-yearold brother’s death on Jan. 21 of this year. He was 12 at the time of the shooting, which happened in the family home in the company of an 18-yearold friend.

The boy shot his brother in the head with their grandfather’s 9-millimetre Beretta. He now faces a maximum sentence of three years in a youth detention centre, minus time served.

In October, Lecompte denied the youth bail, ruling that no new facts had been presented that would justify a change in the preventive custody order issued in June.

Monday, defence lawyer Isabel Schurman argued things have changed.

She got the youth’s cousin, who herself has four teenagers, to retestify that she can take him in under “house arrest” at her home and to add she’ll seek help from her own son’s psychologist and mental-health experts at their CLSC.

The youth’s grandmother also testified, through an Italian interpreter, that she can help keep an eye on him too.

Better all this attention from loved ones than the potentially bad influence of the eight other detainees — all older — that the teenager now lives with at Batshaw Youth and Family Centres, Schurman said.

But Crown prosecutor Marie-Claude Bourassa argued that despite their good intentions, the teenager’s extended family is ill-equipped to monitor the youth, who she said still poses a risk to society.

The teenager was to have been sentenced Monday but that was postponed because a Philippe Pinel Institute psychiatrist’s report on him was not ready. It will be by Jan. 22, the psychiatrist, Martin Gignac, told the court.

Gignac testified he believes the teenager has a “conduct disorder” that at his young age (almost 14) has and can continue to be helped by therapy, with only a “moderate” chance he’ll return to his delinquent ways.

The court has heard the youth adopted a criminal life- style in the months before the shooting, abusing drugs and alcohol, secretly taking his mother’s car at night, breaking into his grandmother’s house and showing off his gun to his friends.

He pleaded guilty to shoplifting and armed robbery in connection with a holdup at a gas station near his home only days before the shooting.

With his divorced parents watching from the front row Monday, the youth, dressed neatly in a grey sweater and black shirt and tie, sat with his lawyers and watched impassively through nearly five hours of proceedings.