GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba – The widow of Omar Khadr’s hand-grenade victim described her husband today as a "generous, loving" husband and dad.
Testifying at Khadr’s sentencing hearing, Tabitha Speer said Sgt. 1st Class Chris Speer would have laid down his life for her. She said she couldn’t have asked for a better father for their two kids.
Speer died 12 days after shrapnel hit him in the head during a raid on a compound in Afghanistan in July 2002.
Khadr admitted to having thrown the grenade and pleaded guilty to murdering the soldier.
Speer spent the last days of his life in a hospital in Germany. Tabitha Speer said she promised her 3-1/2-year-old daughter Taryn and niece that she would go there and bring him home.
"I broke that promise," she said through tears.
Jurors involved in sentencing Khadr for war crimes also saw photographs of Speer and his two children.
His wife said he always spent as much time as he could with them. "If he were home, he did as much for the caring of the children as I did."
She described telling Taryn how her dad would not be coming home.
"She let out a scream," she told the military commission court. "A part of my daughter died with my husband."
Now 11, Taryn still remembers her dad, she said, sharing his love of Elvis.
"Someone who is so unworthy stole all of this from her," Speer said.
She read for the court a letter Taryn wrote, addressed to Khadr.
"I’m mad at you because of what you did to my family," Speer quoted the letter as saying.
"You make me really sad. I’m mad at you because of that."
"It took everything in my daughter to write this," Speer said.
Her son, Tanner, who was 10 months old at the time, has no memories of his father.
He, too, wrote a letter to Khadr, that Speer read in court.
"Omar Khadr should go to jail because of the open hole he made in my family by killing my dad," he wrote. "Army rocks. Bad guys stink."
Earlier, Navy Capt. Patrick McCarthy, who interacted extensively with Khadr in the detention camps of Guantanamo Bay testified for the defence that the detainee was always respectful and happy.
McCarthy, a senior staff lawyer in the camps between May 2006 and July 2008, said he came to believe over time that Khadr had "rehabilitative potential."
He was struck by Khadr’s "pleasant demeanour."
Under cross-examination, McCarthy did say he didn’t know details of the five war crimes to which Khadr pleaded guilty to on Monday.
Nor had he heard of times Khadr swore at prison guards.
But testifying via video link from deployment in Afghanistan, McCarthy cited Khadr’s age – 15 at the time of his crimes – as a "fact that I can’t get past."
He noted that Khadr was barely into his teens when his late father, Ahmed Khadr, an associate of Osama bin Laden, took him to Afghanistan.
"The fact that his father took him to become involved with the al-Qaida leads me to believe that he has rehabilitative potential."
"Mr. Khadr was a child," McCarthy said, but added that he did think Khadr should be punished.
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