What A Waste....

"The memories are always there. It's not like they are ever gone. It's just another life that's lost and their family is going through what our family went through, and that's very, very sad."
"I have no advice. I would simply say our hearts go out to them."
Cathy Oatway, Ottawa

What a generous, empathetic response, coming straight from the heart of a mother whose son was unaccountably taken at 23 years of age. Michael Oatway was a passenger on an OC Transpo bus on September 21, 2006. When a group of rowdy teens got on the bus and demanded of him that he hand over his girlfriend's iPod which he had borrowed and was using, Shawn McKenzie, then 17, stabbed him to death.

Shawn McKenzie, 19, was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison without parole for the first-degree murder of Michael Oatway.

"Michael Oatway, 23, was stabbed to death aboard the No. 118 in September 2006."

Shawn McKenzie, because of his age was tried as a youth, but when it came to his sentencing, Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger saw fit to sentence him as an adult to life in prison with no parole eligibility for the next ten years.  "It was a needless, deliberate taking of a young life. Shawn McKenzie is entirely responsible for the killing of Michael Oatway. His moral culpability is complete", said Judge Maranger at the time of sentencing.

The young McKenzie expressed no remorse over having killed another human being, someone who had done him no harm. "Throughout the whole preliminary hearing and the trial, there was no show of remorse, concern, regret -- and that has been the hardest part to sit through. To watch him sit there, very smugly, almost without a care in the world", commented Michael Oatway's sister, Grace Routh, at the time of the trial.

 

Shawn McKenzie, four years after sentencing and incarceration, is dead. Armed with a secretive, prison-made device, in Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, he attacked a 41-year-old inmate whom he viewed as a rival. He attempted to kill the older prisoner and in the scuffle he was himself fatally knifed. Both men were rushed to hospital, the older man surviving, Shawn McKenzie dying from the wounds he sustained.

 

This is what some might term a kind of nasty, degraded justice of the murky underworld.

Leaving one more woman in pained anguish at the death of her son, whom she had already lost much earlier when he became a psychopathic killer, sentenced to life imprisonment. "I am hoping for a second chance for my son", said Deon Pearson, Shawn McKenzie's mother. "What happened, I can't change that. But he is my son and I can't give up on him. I'm sorry for all this mess", she said at the time of his sentencing, "I'm so sorry".

Clearly, her son had no use for a 'second chance'.