A B.C. Supreme Court judge has sentenced a Kelowna man to 15 years in prison for killing a female security guard on UBC’s Okanagan campus in 2022.
Dante Ognibenne-Hebbourn, 24, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Tuesday for killing 24-year-old Harmandeep Kaur when she was working on campus during an early morning shift.
The court heard details of the attack, which happened in three intense acts of violence over a 10-minute period. The accused kicked Kaur nearly two dozen times in the head while she was lying on the ground.
The judge said Ognibenne-Hebbourn had a long history of mental health issues and was in a drug-induced psychosis when he killed Kaur.
The judge said the killing is extremely unsettling because it was “random” and “senseless,” and called it another example of extreme violence the courts are seeing by someone in drug psychosis or with a long history of mental health challenges.
Members of Kaur’s family have said she came to Canada from India in 2015 and was working at the university to raise money to go back to school to become a paramedic.
She received her permanent residency just weeks before she died, in February 2022.
Several members of Kaur’s family were in the courtroom gallery during the hearing.
A victim impact statement from her mother described Kaur as having “a pure heart, a strong spirit and endless love for her family. She was a hard-working, loving daughter.”
“She came to Canada with dreams, not only for us, but for her family,” the statement read.
Her mother wrote about the grief her family has suffered since her daughter’s death, and asked the court to for a sentence to serve as a deterrent so that “no other family has to experience what we are going through.”
“Every day since her death, we have lived with unbearable grief. There is no peace in our home, only silence and sorrow,” read the statement.
LISTEN | CBC News reporter Brady Strachan on the court case:
