Ten years for 2018 Christmas Day fatal stabbing

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This article was published 19/12/2020 (2091 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nearly two years after Tyler Smoke was fatally attacked with a machete on a lonely Winnipeg back lane on Christmas morning, his killer has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

“This was especially brutal,” Queen’s Bench Justice Anne Turner told Keenan Tom at a sentencing hearing Thursday. “It’s not strong enough to say this was a senseless act of cruel violence.”

Tom, 26, was originally charged with second-degree murder in the Dec. 25, 2018, attack but pleaded guilty earlier this month to the reduced charge of manslaughter.

Smoke, who was 26 and struggled with addictions, was trying to sell some personal electronics at the corner of Sherbrook Street and Ellice Avenue when he encountered Tom and four friends around 7 a.m.

Smoke offered to sell them a tablet and headphones in exchange for a $10 “point” (roughly 0.1 gram) of methamphetamine. Instead, the group lured him to a back lane where they intended to rob him.

After being knocked to the ground and robbed of his property, Smoke got to his feet and was walking away, when Tom ran at him from behind and stabbed him with a machete in the hip and chest.

Tom ran to a friend’s nearby home and wrapped the bloody machete in a sweater and confessed he had just killed somebody, a witness later told police.

A couple who lived in the area heard the commotion and ran to help Smoke, who was pleading: “Please don’t let me die,” court heard.

Smoke was in a “very difficult and vulnerable state” when he was attacked, Turner said.

“To be at the corner of a downtown street before 7 a.m. on Christmas morning selling your possessions in order to get meth cannot be described as anything other than tragic,” the judge said.

Tom, whose criminal record prior to Smoke’s death included no crimes of violence, has had his own troubles with addictions and substance abuse, court heard. At 14, his mother died of an accidental overdose while being held at the Main Street Project under the Intoxicated Persons Detention Act.

Tom’s mother’s death was a “terrible turning point,” Turner said, causing him to retreat to drugs and twice attempt suicide.

Tom, who was intoxicated at the time of the killing, told court at an earlier hearing his violent actions were “out of character” and he had no memory of stabbing Smoke.

Defence lawyer Billy Marks had urged Turner to consider an eight-year sentence, arguing Tom’s time in pre-sentence custody has been difficult, after contracting COVID-19 at Headingley Correctional Centre and long periods confined to his cell for 23 1/2 hours a day.

Turner said the Criminal Code limits enhanced credit for pre-sentence custody to no more than 1.5 days for every day served. To further lower Tom’s sentence would “dodge this section of the code and its clear instruction.”

Tom received credit for time served, reducing his remaining sentence to more than seven years. 

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca