A Regina man has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for the death of 32-year-old Ronald Matthew Kay.
Trevor Asapace, 30, was in a Regina courtroom Wednesday where he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for manslaughter. Minus time already served, Asapace will serve 14 years and five months in jail.
Kay was considered a missing person’s cold case until Asapace confessed to police about the murder.
Court heard Kay had no fixed address, and often couch surfed. On one particular day in November, he crashed at a house in Regina. Asapace and others drank alcohol and did drugs when an altercation broke out.
At the house, there were accusations that Kay was a child molester. Asapace confessed to beating Kay in the living room. Court heard the victim suffered from a number of degrading acts.
Asapace admitted to firing a pellet gun at Kay’s groin, urinating on him, taking off his clothes and cutting his hair. The latter in an attempt to disguise his identity, court heard. Asapace then dumped his body in a garbage bin. Kay’s body has never been located.
Victim impact statement read in court by family member Richard Kotowich talked of the relenting search for Kay’s body to no success.
“We searched and searched for him… the family’s pain is real pain,” he said.
“We can’t see him anymore. Why would you take someone’s life away from us,” Kotowich said.
Throughout the statement, Asapace had his face buried in his hands, weeping.
Addressing the court, he tells Kay’s family “I’m very sorry to what happened to Ron… It hurt a whole lot of people,” Asapace said.
“I only wish they could forgive me for what happened that night,” he said, sobbing out loud.
Kay was the subject of a missing persons report after he was last seen on Nov. 10, 2013 at a Saskatchewan Roughriders football game.
Asapace’s lawyer Noah Evanchuk called the case “unprecedented”, and if it were not for Asapace’s “crisis of consciousness”, Evanchuk believed it would have remained a cold case.
“In the hundreds of homicide files I’ve had the opportunity to work on in my career, I’ve never seen a case where my client was not only not a suspect, and not a person of interest, and came forward to confess.”
“Without Trevor Asapace having a crisis of consciousness and wanting to give peace for the family, this case would be unsolved. I don’t think based on what we know at this point, it ever would have been solved but for Trevor Asapace.