“It’s not closure, I’m not happy, I don’t feel like dancing. I feel like justice has been done,” victim Catherine Riddell said outside court Wednesday...
After three long years, Catherine Riddell will finally have a good night’s sleep.
For her, and many of the people left physically and mentally shattered when a man driving a rented van rampaged along a Yonge Street sidewalk in April 2018 trying to kill as many people as he could, the guilty verdict came with a wave of relief.
“It’s like holding our breath for three years, we can finally breathe,” said Nick D’Amico, flanked by his parents and sister. They all wore purple jackets adorned with the name of his sister Anne Marie D’Amico, one of the 10 people murdered on the sunny spring afternoon in North York in the worst mass killing in Toronto’s history.
“It’s not closure, I’m not happy, I don’t feel like dancing. I feel like justice has been done,” said Riddell, one of the 16 people who were nearly killed. “He is in jail where he belongs and that’s good enough for me.”
In a decision livestreamed on YouTube, Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy found Alek Minassian, 28, criminally responsible for the mass killing, rejecting the defence argument that his specific form of autism spectrum disorder rendered him incapable of knowing what he did was morally wrong.
Minassian “thought about committing these crimes over a considerable period of time and made a considered decision to proceed. His attack on these 26 victims that day was an act of a reasoning mind, notwithstanding its horrific nature, and notwithstanding that he has no remorse for it and no empathy for his victims,” she said.
He planned his attack to generate as much fame as possible for himself, and had fantasized about committing a mass killing since he was in high school, she said.
He also clearly understood the consequences of his actions, actively concealing his planning and his frequenting of online sites that he knew others would find horrifying.
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