Youth acquitted in fatal stabbing case, despite taunting victim’s friends after
An Ontario court judge has acquitted a youth of manslaughter, despite the fact that the young killer fatally stabbed another person and then mocked the victim’s friend.
An Ontario court judge has acquitted a youth of manslaughter, despite the fact that the young killer fatally stabbed another person and then mocked the victim’s friend.
The incident took place in July 2022, when a teenage boy fatally stabbed 18-year-old Auptin Abedini-Senoubari with a bottle. It was the climax of an escalating fight between two groups in a North York parking lot.
Following the incident, the accused messaged the victim’s friend, saying, “Ur homie dropped like a fly that day.” The accused also later sent a video of Abedini-Senoubari lying on the ground after being stabbed.
“Ur right we had to yoke your homie we had to make it personal,” the accused wrote to the victim’s friend. “U think I’m scared come to my crib watch what happens … Don’t slip bc if you do u gon have to say what’s up to Auptin for me.”
In a decision released last month, Superior Court Justice Andras Schreck ruled that the Crown had failed to disprove that the then-17-year-old boy was acting in self-defence.
While Schreck called the case a “senseless altercation between two groups of teenagers,” the judge considered that the accused was also facing a threat from the victim’s group, some of whom “had demonstrated that they were not above ganging up” on others.
Despite the fact that the accused was the only one with a weapon, Schreck ruled that “the armed individual is facing a threat from a group,” which put them “at a disadvantage and the use of a weapon may be reasonable to counter that disadvantage.”
Both parties had attended the same “all ages” event at a lounge in the Finch Avenue West and Dufferin Street area earlier in the night. The accused had been kicked out and was arguing with a security guard outside when the victim and his friends began to taunt him and record him with their phones.
The accused then became angry, and he and his friends began “exchanging taunts and insults with the other group,” the judge noted, ruling that he wasn’t just facing the threat of a punch from Abedini-Senoubari, but rather “a group assault by several individuals.”
While the accused was also with a group of friends, all but one had left, while several members of Abedini-Senoubari’s group remained at the time of the stabbing.
Schreck called it a “close case,” but added that his verdict shouldn’t be construed “as condoning” the conduct of the accused.
“This case involved the tragic and senseless loss of the life of a young man who had his whole future ahead of him,” Schreck wrote. “The altercation that led to this involved the escalation of a dispute over nothing of any importance and was fuelled by machismo and unfocused, immature and unjustified aggression by adolescents apparently attempting to emulate some sort of gangster culture.”
However, Crown attorney Alice Bradstreet argued that the accused’s motive was not self-defence but rather to harm the victim for having taunted him outside the event, arguing that the text messages which followed the murder showed an animus toward the victim.
“Without the context of the other party’s portion of the conversation, I am not inclined to put much weight on the text messages. In any event, given (the accused’s) age and the overall immature tone of the messages, I am of the view that the messages were largely an expression of juvenile bravado rather than a genuine description of his state of mind,” Schreck concluded.
“In my view, both (the accused) and Mr. Abedini-Senoubari made poor decisions at different points and chose to escalate or continue the altercation rather than end it,” the judge wrote.