WETASKIWIN, Alta. – A sentencing hearing began Wednesday for an Alberta woman who drowned her two sons, 10-month-old Jayden and two-year-old Connor, in the family bathtub.
A Wetaskiwin courtroom heard the impact the deaths had on the boys’ grandparents, who shared their victim statements. The Crown began with Jim McConnell, the boys’ grandfather. He wrote, “the deaths of my grandsons has left a big gap in my life…Time heals but at 62 years old it won’t be enough time.”
His wife, Audrey, chose to read her statement and said, “I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at their pictures and smile.”
She went on to describe lying in bed with their little shirts after their deaths, trying to remember their smell, as well as washing their fingerprints off a glass door and then regretting it because they’d never be there again. She also recalled going to Jayden’s grave and putting candles down on his birthday in March, but instead of singing happy birthday to him they had to sing happy birthday to his grave.
Curtis McConnell, the boys’ father, asked his statements to be kept private.
Allyson McConnell of Millet, Alta., had originally been charged with second-degree murder in relation to the deaths but was convicted of manslaughter last month.
Justice Michelle Crighton ruled the Crown had not proved that the depressed and suicidal McConnell knew what she was doing when she killed her two boys.
On Wednesday, Crown prosecutor Gordon Hatch drown home that claim.
“It’s a clear decision to end a life, a decison she made twice,” he said.
The Crown has argued she killed the boys as revenge against her husband with whom she was undergoing a bitter divorce.
McConnell testified she has no memory of the killing, though.
Defence lawyer Peter Royal argued that McConnell’s mind was so clouded by booze, sleeping pills and severe depression that she couldn’t have formed the intent required to convict her of murder.
Court was told that McConnell, who is originally from Australia, had a long history of suicide attempts that began after her father got her pregnant when she was 15.
Investigators found several searches on her computer relating to suicide and drowning that had been conducted in the days before the deaths.
They included a search that asked: “How long does it take to drown?” and another asking: “How long does it take to die from strangulation?”
Officers also found a rope tied to a joist in the basement. A chair was sitting underneath.
McConnell testified that she had trouble getting one of the boys to go to sleep that night, and that she then sat down on her couch and began drinking and taking sleep medication, overwhelmed by her depression and stress from the divorce.
She remembers waking up in a bathtub, along with submerged and plugged-in electrical appliances, but little else.
She later drove to Edmonton, parked at a toy store, ordered lunch and then tried to kill herself by jumping off a bridge onto a busy freeway.
The trial was told it was her estranged husband, Curtis McConnell, who pulled the lifeless bodies of his little boys from a tub of cold water.
In the sentencing trial, the Crown is asking for Alyson McConnell to be sentenced to 12 years minus 1.5 for time served, which means she would still have 9 years to serve. The Defence would like to see no additional jail time for McConnell.
A decision is expected June 4, 2012.
With files from Erin Chalmers, Global News
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