Calgary CTrain killer sentenced in assault

A woman convicted in the 2007 death of a teenager has been given a 15-month sentence following a vicious attack on a woman in Calgary last summer.

On Tuesday, court heard in an agreed statement of facts that on July 25, 2016 the victim and 36-year-old Natalie Pasqua were drinking in a downtown parking lot with friends.

At one point, the woman went to retrieve something from her car and Pasqua told the victim she and a man needed her vehicle.

They all got in the car together and began driving around. At one point, Pasqua became angry and began punching the woman. Over the course of the beating, Pasqua dug her fingers into the victim’s eyes. She was bleeding from her face and the back of her head.

The woman managed to get away by “playing dead” and was eventually able to unlock the door to the car and throw herself out of the vehicle.

The victim spent more than 10 days in hospital and was unable to work for more than three months after the assault.

Pasqua pleaded guilty to assault causing bodily harm and theft of a motor vehicle.

With time served, Pasqua will be out in the community in four months without additional probation.

“If Ms. Pasqua was convicted of the robbery and the kidnapping, that alone would put her in the range of five years of incarceration, if not more,” Pasqua’s lawyer, Adriano Iovinelli, said. “But because of the circumstances of the case and the evidence, this is how this plea arrangement was worked out.”

The family of  Gage Prevost, the teen Pasqua killed in 2007, said the plea deal came as a blow to them, nearly 10 years after his death.

“I just don’t know what it’s going to take for the justice system to stand up and say, ‘OK, it’s time to protect society,’” Gage’s aunt, Karen Prevost, said.

Pasqua pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2009 after she shoved 17-year-old Gage into an oncoming CTrain.

She was originally convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 12 years behind bars but won a new trial and then took a plea deal.

She was sentenced to the equivalent of five years and four months.

“She told us that once this was over, she was going to come out and live her life in honour of Gage and her own children,” Prevost said. “She’s done nothing but the opposite since.”