A man has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 12 years after he admitted to killing one man and shooting another in Halifax in 2016.
Tyrell Peter Dechamp appeared in Halifax court Wednesday via videoconference from prison in Quebec.
Second-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life in prison, but parole ineligibility can range from 10 to 25 years.
The judge accepted the Crown and defence’s joint recommendation of 12 years for the murder of Naricho Clayton and 12 years for the attempted murder of Ricardo Whynder, to be served concurrently.
Dechamp pleaded guilty last month to the double-shooting.
“We had to take a lot of things into account,” said Crown prosecutor Tanya Carter. “As my colleague said in court, the passage of time has a large effect, looking at the totality of the circumstances, and Mr. Dechamp’s other matters.”
Carter called Dechamp a “very dangerous person” and said the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.
“We always hope that there’s rehabilitation through the federal system so that if a person is released down the road that it doesn’t happen again, but right now separation from society and protecting the public is of paramount importance when someone shows that level of dangerousness,” said Carter.
“If you had a history of serious violence, and you haven’t been shown to have taken measures to rehabilitate yourself and you repeat offend, then certainly that’s a key red flag for future dangerousness.”
‘A very heavy day’
Clayton’s sister Natavia Gray said Wednesday was a “very heavy day,” but also a day when the family received “some sort of justice.”
“Almost 10 years and we are just now receiving a verdict. It’s reopened a lot of wounds for us, retraumatized us a lot,” said Gray. “It’s been a long time coming and our family, we just were glad that it’s over.
Clayton’s mother, Eleanor Gray, noted she cares for his son, who “looks just like him.”
“Words can’t explain how I feel, the loss of my son,” she said. “But I know he’s with me each and every day.”
Shots fired on April 19, 2016
Halifax Regional Police responded to reports of shots fired in the 2000 block of Gottingen Street before 11 p.m. on April 19, 2016. When they arrived, they found two men who had been shot inside a vehicle.
Clayton, 23, died at the scene. Whynder, who was 31 at the time, was taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries, but he survived.
Dechamp was arrested in December 2017 and charged with second-degree murder and attempted murder.
His case was supposed to go to trial in 2020 but it was paused due to COVID-19. The trial was pushed back to 2022, but was delayed again when Dechamp fired his lawyer.
Last month, as the case was supposed to go to trail again, Dechamp instead pleaded guilty to both charges.
Lengthy criminal history
Dechamp has a lengthy criminal history and was previously convicted of two other murders.
Parole documents revealed he killed a man, Matthew Ayre, by stabbing him in the neck, and punched a woman hard enough to cause bleeding of the brain.
Dechamp was on a statutory release from prison, where he had served two-thirds of a sentence for second-degree murder and aggravated assault, at the time of the double-shooting,
He had failed to return to a halfway house on Gottingen Street the night he shot Clayton and Whynder.
Dechamp was also convicted in March 2020 of first-degree murder in the death of 29-year-old Tyler Richards, a former basketball star at St. Francis Xavier University and with the Halifax Rainmen.
Richards was found dead inside a home on Cook Avenue in Halifax on April 17, 2016 – just two days before the double-shooting on Gottingen Street.
First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Dechamp appealed the conviction but was unsuccessful.
Source: CTV News Atlantic’s Jonathan MacInnis and Callum Smith
