Just a Random Break-and-Enter

"I was drunk and I just pretty much took my anger right out on him."
Unnamed youth on trial for second-degree murder, Edmonton

"[The youth] took her [two-year-old girl] back to her bedroom and helped her get back to sleep."
Crown prosecutor Jim Stewart

John Stanley Kwiatkowski, 29, was found dead in 2011 in his Edmonton home

As a young offender at the time of the crime, the man cannot be named; he was 17, just before his 18th birthday when he had escaped a youth jail in Regina, Saskatchewan the week before he arrived in the neighbourhood where John Stanley Kwiatkowski lived with his wife and their two-year-old child. He drove there in a Jeep he had stolen, planning to steal anything he could find. He had taken with him a metal pipe before entering the unlocked front door of the house on April 13, 2011.

It was a randomly-selected house the youth entered, claiming in an interview afterward that he would never have entered the house to begin with if the door had been locked. He would have "took my anger out on someone else on the street". So it was just Mr. Kwiatkowski's bad luck, and that of his grieving wife and fatherless child that he had overlooked locking his front door that fateful night.

Perhaps he had figured, trustingly, he would leave the door open to make it easier for his wife, on duty that night as a nurse, to enter their home on her return.

As it was, when Mr. Kwiatkowski's wife had completed her night-shift and returned home, it was to discover the grisly remains of her dead husband who had been struck in the head no fewer than 20 times, as her husband, a city worker, slept, sending him into a deep slumber from which he would never awaken.

During the process of striking the life out of Mr. Kwiatkowski, the youth had inadvertently struck the family's infant daughter who had toddled into the bedroom.The little girl was found later to have suffered minor injuries to her face and hand.

The young man had taken the trouble of ushering the child back to her bedroom to sooth her and encourage her to fall back to sleep. And then he set about completing the reason he had entered the Kwiatkowski family home. He took a video game system, a video camera, clothing and the child's piggy bank. He also drank a can of ginger ale and that was his undoing.

He left the emptied can on a table before leaving. Where investigators later found his DNA imprinted on the can. As for the stolen property, it was discovered in the stolen Jeep. The property recovered, but nothing could restore a living, breathing husband and father to his family left forlorn and bereaved in their dreadful loss at his horribly premature death.

Crown prosecutor M. Stewart informed the court that he intended to seek an adult sentence for the youth, now 21, at a hearing to be held in January, 2015.

Handout   John Stanley Kwiatkowski was killed as he slept in his bedroom in his Edmonton home by a teen during a random break-and-enter on April 13, 2011.