Man who starved brother faces prison
Crown says ‘abuse and horror’ calls for 17-year sentence
BROCKVILLE According to submissions by defence counsel and Crown attorneys at the sentencing hearing of a man convicted of starving his disabled brother to death in 2008, Jerry Hawley is either a man with a mental illness who “let his brother down” or a cold, callous coward who hated his brother enough to take his disability cheques while he wasted away.
Hawley, 36, was found guilty of manslaughter in February after his physically and mentally disabled brother Jamie, 41, died weighing 57 pounds and covered in his own feces.
In a victim impact statement, Steve McKellar described the loss of his friend Jamie, whom he supported at Community Living Kingston from 1983 to 2000.
Learning of the “horrible details” of Jamie’s death and sitting in on five weeks of trial, listening to the way Jamie was forced to live, have shaken him to his core, he said.
“I will never forget the images of those photographs,” McKellar said. Those photographs showed Jamie after he’d lost more than 50 per cent of his body weight, covered in 33 pressure ulcers — the most an expert on pressure ulcers said he’d ever seen because most people would have received medical attention before it ever got that bad. The images keep him awake at night, McKellar said, and fill his thoughts daily.
In response, Justice Lynn Ratushny offered McKellar some comforting words.
“Our lives are made up of minutes, hours and days, and you made so many of those minutes, hours and days of Jamie’s life better,” she said to a courtroom full of Community Living employees and clients, many wiping away tears.
Defence lawyer Michael O’Shaughnessy, in his submission for a sentence of eight to 10 years less one-anda-half times the three years Hawley has already served in pre-sentencing custody, said his client was a hard-working man who had been diagnosed with a depressive and bipolar disorders that contributed to his state of mind.
But even he conceded that a right-thinking person couldn’t look at the last pictures of Jamie without asking how Hawley could have allowed that to happen.
“Jerry Hawley isn’t looking at this through clear eyes,” O’Shaughnessy said
The defence maintained Hawley has shown remorse and taken responsibility.
Crown prosecutors, however, weren’t hindered by the manslaughter conviction when calling Jamie’s death a homicide. A jury convicted Hawley of manslaughter because they found he didn’t intend to kill his brother. Prosecutor Alan Findlay argued, though, that manslaughter definitions vary from near accident to near murder and the circumstances of Hawley’s case — how his brother died and the conditions in which he was found — suggest that this was the most extreme case of manslaughter.
The mistreatment happened over a period of years, all years where Hawley collected the disability cheques sent to his brother but managed to use the money to do something other than simply feed him, the Crown said.
Hawley was an “accused person who over a period of years, abused, demeaned, starved his brother,” Findlay said.
Jamie’s death wasn’t born of indifference, the Crown argued, but of cruelty.
“That you have sitting before you a man capable of such abuse and horror tells you something about his future prospects in society,” Findlay said, asking for sentence of 17 years beginning Friday.
Hawley himself spoke before the end of the hearing. Hawley said he’s been dealing with the loss of his brother for five years and will continue to deal with it for the rest of his life. He’s made a choice to “rewalk with Christ” and hopes to become an ordained pastor.
A sentencing decision is scheduled for Aug. 30.