For nine years, five months and 13 days, Annie Hutton has struggled to articulate the weight she’s carried in the wake of a life-changing loss.
It felt like a “soul-crushing” anvil was placed on her chest Jan. 25, 2014, when she learned her son, Chris Ausman, had been killed. The pressure has never lessened.
“The tragedy of losing a child is every parent’s worst nightmare, but it wasn’t supposed to happen to me,” Hutton said Thursday, at Steven Pirko’s sentencing.
“A mother’s heart is built to endure the trials, triumphs and dramas associated with raising children into productive adults and loving parents. When those years are so suddenly and horrifically ripped away, what is left is nothing short of a living hell, my shattered heart will not heal.”
In the months and years that followed, she learned his killer was Pirko. On that night, he was with his friend Elrick Dyck, who mouthed off and engaged Ausman in a fight. He called for help when he started to lose.
Jumping in, Pirko, then 21-years-old, struck Ausman, 32, in the head with a hammer at least twice on Kelowna, B.C.’s Highway 33. He was arrested in 2016, then in January 2020 convicted of second-degree murder and sent to prison.
The court of appeal, in a unanimous decision by a three-justice panel, overturned Pirko’s conviction in March, ruling that the trial judge’s charge to the jury was “so confusing as to amount to an error in law.”
On Thursday, Pirko pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to eight years in prison, less nine years and 15 days for time served. That means he will be a free man, with the exception of a three year probation term by the end of the day.
Hutton had hoped for little more. Time served was expected and, as she said after the sentencing hearing ended, nothing would bring back her son.
Her hope is that Pirko can go on and become a productive member of society, maybe help other kids in his position: A life of disadvantages, drug abuse and poverty.
For her family, however, it’s time to live life the way her larger-than-life boy, whose hugs she can still feel and whose loss she is continually aware of, would want. But she wants to disabuse anyone of the idea that their ordeal is over with this court decision.
As her husband Bob Hutton said, “there’s no such thing as closure.”
This latest chapter, however, was hard.
“We slowly started adjusting our lives without him, knowing that the person who took Chris away from us was behind bars and unable to do this to another family,” she said. “Then on March 16, (with the court of appeal decision) what the hell happened, the bandaid was ripped off again.”
She knew he was appealing his sentence, but didn’t expect it would actually happen.
Thursday, Crown counsel unsuccessfully asked for a 15-year period of imprisonment, putting emphasis on the “near murder” element of the crime.
Pirko had stepped into the one-minute-and-30-second fight between Ausman and his friend. He had other options and he wasn’t in the fight himself, the Crown said.
Pirko said Dyck knew that he’d been carrying a hammer — a tool grabbed in haste for protection when he left the house he was at earlier that night– and he asked him to use it.
“My basic camaraderie with my f—ing friend will land me in jail for the rest of my life,” he told investigators in footage shown during the original trial and during the manslaughter sentencing.
This awareness of the risk that hitting Ausman in the head with a hammer could be life-ending is why Crown counsel, David Grabavac, was looking for an unusually long sentence.
It’s not in line with what the courts in Canada have done, defence lawyer Jordan Watt argued and Justice Alison Beames agreed.
Had she gone with the Crown’s submission, she said, it would have been far out of line with what Canadian courts have done in the past.
Pirko, Watt said, carried the weight of that crime, and it’s been paid for, he argued, with a sentence that amounts to roughly nine years of prison time.
With time served taken into account, Watt said the six to seven years that Pirko has spent in a variety of prison settings is the same as nine years.
“There is no gratuitous violence,” Watt said.
“This was not a prolonged situation, was not some sophisticated planned attack on Mr. Ausman. It was impulsive.”
Watt said “it’s hardly imaginable to consider” that what Pirko did would amount to 15 years.
“The Crown’s position is harsh, unreasonable and inconsistent with the purpose and principles of sentencing,” he told the court.
Watt told the court it should focus its attention on Pirko’s rehabilitation. Pirko, he said, has become and stayed sober since his incarceration has finished Grade 8 and Grade 9, and is working toward finishing Grade 10.
He’s also enrolled in other programs.
“Mr. Pirko does not need to be separated from society anymore,” he said.
The court agreed. After the sentencing ended, Watt said that he’s seen Pirko make life improvements over the years he’s represented him.
During his three years of probation, he has expectations that those improvements will continue.