Adonay Zekarias sentenced to life in prison for Cabbagetown murder
http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2015/06/12/adonay-zekarias-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-for-cabbagetown-murder.html
‘Why did this happen?’ judge asks at sentencing in Cabbagetown murder
No motive was ever presented for the 2012 stabbing murder of Nighisti Semret.
By: Jacques Gallant Staff Reporter, Published on Fri Jun 12 2015
Nighisti Semret was a gentle, hard-working woman, “the scaffolding
that held the family together,” a courtroom heard on Friday at the
sentencing of her killer.
Adonay Zekarias, convicted earlier this week by a jury of first-degree
murder, was handed an automatic sentence of life in prison without the
possibility of parole for 25 years.
A 55-year-old mother of four, Semret was stabbed multiple times in the
pouring rain on Oct. 23, 2012 in a laneway near her Cabbagetown home.
She was on her way back from the night shift at a downtown hotel where
she worked as a cleaner.
The pair knew each other from staying at the same refugee shelter
after arriving in Canada from Eritrea.
“There is nothing that I have done. There is nothing that I did,”
Zekarias told Superior Court Justice Ian Nordheimer through an
interpreter.
He said Semret was “nothing but a friend” and that he plans to appeal.
Zekarias is still facing a second-degree murder charge for killing
Rigat Ghirmay, a woman he lived with, allegedly because she became
suspicious that he had killed Semret.
A motive was never established for Semret’s murder, something that
both her son, David Ntahobali, and the judge touched on.
“A chapter it seems will never close until we know the reasons why the
events of that morning transpired,” Ntahobali said in a victim impact
statement read by Crown attorney Mary Humphrey.
“As long as that remains a mystery, there is no real closure for us,
no real end to the emotional turbulence that we enter from time to
time when thoughts of my mother surface.”
He said his mother’s main goal was to save enough money to pay for her
children’s tuition and to eventually buy a house.
The court also heard from a friend of Semret’s, a cousin and her
former employer, who all spoke of her kind and quiet nature, and of
her emphasis on hard work.
The judge said that by all accounts, Semret was a contributing member
of society, looking to start a better life in Canada.
“We still have a natural desire to know the reasons for the act, so
that we can try to have some understanding of what had happened,” said
Nordheimer. “Why did this murder happen? We simply do not know and
will probably never know.”
With files from Alyshah Hasham
Received on Fri Jun 12 2015 - 20:40:27 EDT