One of the teen girls accused in the fatal swarming attack on a homeless Toronto man has been found not guilty of second-degree murder, but guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Philip Campbell said it wasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the girl dealt the fatal blow to Kenneth Lee, or had the state of mind required for murder during the 2022 attack.
“This was a manslaughter, and was very close to the most serious example of that offence, but it was not a murder,” he said Friday as he delivered the verdict.
The girl, who was 14 at the time of the attack, had tried to plead guilty to manslaughter at the start of her murder trial, but the Crown rejected that plea.
She was one of eight girls between the ages of 13 and 16 who were arrested and charged with second-degree murder after Lee’s death. The other seven girls have pleaded guilty to lesser charges — five to manslaughter, one to assault and one to assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm.
At this girl’s trial, prosecutors argued that she was the one who inflicted Lee’s fatal wound by stabbing the 59-year-old with a knife or a small pair of scissors during the December 2022 attack in a downtown Toronto parkette.
No knife was ever recovered as part of the investigation, the trial heard, and the defence said the girl didn’t have a knife at any point that night.
But the judge found that the girl did have a weapon at one point during the attack: a small pair of scissors.
“She had a weapon and a demonstrated willingness to use it against Mr. Lee,” he wrote in his verdict, referencing surveillance video footage of the attack that was central to the trial.
“She was pressing hard to get close to Mr. Lee, scissors in hand. Her animus toward him was high. She made a distinct upward gesture with the hand holding the scissors.”
However, Campbell said, “it is the inconsistency between the wound and the weapon, and the inability to eliminate
conclusively a wound by another person using another weapon, that leaves me undecided as to who stabbed Mr. Lee in the heart, and how.”
The girl’s defence lawyer had argued it’s impossible to tell from the video who stabbed Lee and when.
But the Crown said in its closing submissions that at two points, the girl can be seen in the video extending her hand in a stabbing motion that correlates with the cuts on Lee’s body.
When she was arrested, the girl was found with two small pairs of scissors and some tweezers, court heard.
The forensic pathologist who examined Lee’s body testified he died from hemorrhagic shock after he was stabbed in the heart. He also had a smaller, non-fatal stab wound near his armpit and an assortment of bruises, court heard.
The pathologist testified it was unlikely that the scissors found with the girl would have caused the wound that killed Lee.
Lee was living in the city’s shelter system and was at the parkette near Toronto’s Union Station with a friend when they
encountered the group. He died in the early hours of Dec. 18, 2022, after undergoing emergency surgery at St. Michael’s Hospital, court has heard.
The judge said Friday that watching the video of the attack left him “struck by the irrational viciousness” of the group’s
conduct and the girl’s use of the scissors as a weapon.
“Yet, this does not lead me to the conclusion that she had the state of mind for murder,” he said. “The word ‘murder’ is not a shorthand for an extreme level of moral failure or a high degree of viciousness.”
The Crown and defence are set to return to court at the end of July for sentencing submissions.
