‘Living through a nightmare’

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This article was published 11/03/2025 (295 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As family members sat stricken with grief, Darius Harper’s aunt told a Winnipeg courtroom about the pain the family has suffered since the ‘horrendous, intentional and absolutely unnecessary’ slaying of the 27-year-old nearly three years ago.

Harper was lured to a shack on Wasagamack First Nation by 34-year-old Jon Hastings, who believed — falsely — Harper had been seeing his girlfriend.

As soon as he walked in the door of the shack where Hastings lived on May 9, 2022, Harper was struck over the back of the head with an axe.

Hastings, who was found guilty of first-degree murder last November by Court of King’s Bench Justice Vic Toews, continued the attack on Harper with an axe, knife and his fists for 20 minutes.

Jody Koch, with her husband Albert at her side, read out a statement on behalf of Harper’s family at Hastings’s sentencing hearing Monday.

“We do not know where to start to express how we have changed or felt,” said Koch, Harper’s aunt. “We feel like we’re living through a nightmare that plays over and over, we can’t move forward and begin our proper healing until we know … Jon Hastings has had his sentencing.”

Koch said Harper was stolen from the family and parts of their souls were taken, too.

“Three years have almost passed since we heard his voice, felt his hugs, looked into his eyes, shared our thoughts, sat at our kitchen table. You have no idea how your planned actions have changed us.”

Koch said Harper’s dinner had been left at the family kitchen table when Hastings asked Harper to come help him with an undisclosed task.

“As he left that fateful evening, his last words were ‘I’m not going anywhere mom, I’ll be home,’ and there his dinner sat,” said Koch, adding the family began to frantically look for Harper and ask people about him after he didn’t return.

Toews gave Hastings life without the ability to apply for parole for 25 years for the murder of Harper — the mandatory sentence — on Monday.

Hastings and his then-girlfriend were at his home on the day of the slaying, when he started accusing the woman of cheating on him, eventually fixating on Harper.

Hastings, the woman testified, tied her wrists together with packing tape and slashed her face, arms and legs with a filleting knife and axe as he demanded to know who she was seeing “behind his back.”

He held the woman captive for hours in the home, at one point drugging her, and locked the door from the outside when he left briefly to get a cigarette.

Some hours later, Hastings showed her a message he sent Harper to lure him to his home, where he attacked him, telling the woman he was going to let him bleed out.

When Harper died, Hastings said, “Look, he’s already gone” and started laughing. Hastings held the woman, in her mid 30s, captive for about 18 hours.

Worried that community members were wondering about her whereabouts, he let her out and told her to return in an hour. She didn’t, and RCMP officers soon arrived to the shack.

Defence lawyer Steve Brennan told court Monday that Hastings’s life was marred by alcohol and drugs, poverty and chronic unemployment.

His parents, Brennan told court, split up when he was young due to alcohol misuse and domestic abuse. He was at first raised by his maternal grandmother, who had gone to residential school, in Wasagamack, while his four younger sisters went into the care of child welfare authorities.

He began using alcohol and cannabis at around nine years old and progressed to cocaine, crack cocaine, and eventually methamphetamine. He developed anxiety and depression.

He lived for a time in Winnipeg as a youth, as his mother tried to regain custody of him and his siblings, but largely lived an unstable life in foster placements.

He later returned to Wasagamack, on Island Lake in the province’s northeast, and resided in the shack where he committed his crimes, which was once a tool shed.

Hastings was convicted of aggravated assault and forcible confinement for his attacks on the woman. Toews gave him a 14-year sentence, which will be served at the same time as his life sentence.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca