When Savannah Rose Kulla-Davies drove off to meet her ex-partner on Tuesday, her father says he had no idea that would be the last time he would see her.
“I wouldn’t have let her go,” he told CBC Toronto in an interview on Friday. “I miss her terribly. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”
Kulla-Davies, 29, was shot dead that day in the parking lot of a Brampton, Ont., plaza. Her ex-partner, Anthony Deschepper, 38, allegedly killed her before abducting their 17-month-old daughter, prompting an Amber Alert. He was later fatally shot by police at a gas bar in Niagara Falls, Ont.
Until then, Tuesday felt like a normal day, Davies said.
Kulla-Davies got a drink from Starbucks and then made her way to the Brampton plaza to meet her ex-partner, said her brother, Spencer Porter. Now, it’s in that plaza that flowers are piling up in her memory.
The purpose of seeing Deschepper was to allow him to spend time with their daughter again, her father said.
“That probably shows a bit of Savannah’s character,” Davies said. “Even though they were not together, she still wanted to make her daughter available to the girl’s father.”
Her father and brother said Kulla-Davies was passionate about dance and worked as a social worker for Peel Region before she became a mother of four children.
“She decided that motherhood was going to be her thing. And that’s what she’s done very successfully.”
“She loved being a mom and now she can’t be a mom,” Davies said.
Three of her Kulla-Davies’s children were from a previous partner, while the youngest was at the centre of the Amber Alert on Tuesday and later found safe, Davies said.
Davies and his family now plan to petition to the court next week to become the official guardians of her youngest, he said.
When she grows older, he said, he’ll tell Kulla-Davies’s daughter what a wonderful, caring and kind person her mother was.
“She’ll ask her brothers and they’ll back that up too, because they loved her as well.”
Despite having her hands full with four children, her brother said Kulla-Davies was always supportive.
She was “always so nice to everybody, so sweet to everybody, always would have my back with anything,” Porter said.
“If I needed anything, she would still be there for me if I needed her to be there for me.”
“We all miss Savannah so much, we all love her so much, and we just wish she could come home, really.”
The shooting that ended Savannah’s life wasn’t the first time Anthony allegedly pulled a gun around her.
Deschepper had firearm charges dating from an incident in 2023 in Brampton, according to his defence lawyer Andrew Edgar, with Savannah being the complainant in the case.
The accused “always denied the allegations and planned to contest them in court,” Edgar said.
Deschepper was out on bail and awaiting trial on those charges when he allegedly killed Kulla-Davies. Her father said it is “ridiculous” that he was out on bail.
“Clearly, the system as we have it today is not serving the community if people are in and out of jail in a minute,” he said.
He added he wished he had known more about her relationship with Deschepper.
“I didn’t know as much as I would like to have known, in retrospect. I wasn’t a big fan. But if your daughter is in love with someone you put up with that and you hope it improves. Clearly in this case, it went completely wrong through no fault of Savannah’s.”
Dechepper’s death is now the subject of an investigation by Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit.
Another woman who was in the car with him was arrested at the scene and has been charged with being an accessory after the fact to murder, according to Peel Regional Police.
Revelations of Deschepper’s previous charges prompted Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown to call for stricter bail reforms on Thursday. That demand came on the same day that the federal government introduced legislation to change the Criminal Code.
Officials have praised the expansion of reverse onuses, which would put the burden on bail-seekers to prove why they should be out of detention as they await trial.
However, reverse onus was already in place for the firearm charges that Deschepper faced.
Porter said of his sister: “She didn’t deserve any of this.”
