HALIFAX, N.S. -- Relatives of an American sailor who was stabbed in the heart during a brawl in Halifax said the sentence given Friday to the killer would have been much tougher had more witnesses come forward.
Following an emotional series of victim-impact statements, Justice Felix Cacchione sentenced Cory Wright to 15 years in prison in the Nov. 4, 2006, manslaughter death of Damon Crooks, a 27-year-old from Jacksonville, Fla.
The Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge said that when time already served is taken into account, Wright will be eligible for parole in just 5 1/2 years.
Corwin Gooden, the half-brother of the deceased U.S. navy petty officer, said outside court that the sentence was "lenient" when compared with U.S. justice.
Gooden and his brother Hurchel Crooks, both residents of Florida,
said the failure of key witnesses to help police is especially disturbing to the family.
They said more information might have led to a more serious charge or a longer sentence.
"We plea the next time that something like this happens that the community, the people who are out there and who were involved, should testify," said Gooden.
"A life was lost. A child is without a father."
As his parents and sister looked on, Hurchel Crooks warned that the city will continue to see a rise in violent assaults and crime unless citizens are more courageous about speaking to police.
"If no one wants to come forward and give witness and testify, the city will never get better," he said. "If crimes are being committed and nobody is willing to do anything about it, you're just giving the perpetrators of crime more power to do what they want."
After Crooks was killed, Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly established a roundtable on violence to discuss crime in the city.
In May, the chief of police acknowledged that violent crime has been increasing in the city, but said it's largely due to gang violence related to drugs and involves people who know one another.
Wright, 25, was charged with second-degree murder, but admitted to the lesser charge in court in March after defence lawyers reached a deal with the Crown.
According to the agreed statement of facts, Crooks had come off the U.S. naval ship Doyle to spend a night with shipmates at the Club Rain in the city's downtown.
As he stood outside on the sidewalk with four others after the club closed, a man "known to Wright" approached Crooks's shipmate, Alvin Leacock, punched him and grabbed at a chain around his neck.
Within seconds, 20 to 30 people were brawling outside the club with "kicking, punching, people being knocked to the ground ... property being dropped and stolen from various participants."
Wright was reported to have been swinging his knife widely "with the result that Damon Crooks, who may have been trying to break up the fighting, was stabbed four times."
One of the stab wounds struck the heavyset sailor in the heart and he died later from severe internal bleeding.
Some of the other events were less clearly defined. The statement of facts stated that Damon Crooks was seen a little later in the fight "trying to push several people away from him."
"It was at this time that Cory Wright came into possession of various pieces of Crooks's identification, which were found on him by police at the time of his arrest."
Wright was on parole at the time of the killing for an earlier attempted murder conviction in the 2002 stabbing of a Halifax man and his girlfriend.
Cacchione, in reading his verdict, conceded that some of Crooks's family would regard the sentence as too light.
However, he told them the difficulty was that a charge of murder might have failed before a jury.
"In this case the evidence of many witnesses was flawed because of intoxication at the time of the event or because of a lack of precise observation of the events or, for a number of witnesses, because they were unco-operative and did not want to assist the authorities," the judge said.
The hearing was emotional as family members read letters describing their anguish at the loss of the quiet young man.
Most portrayed a gentle giant of a man with a tendency to help others when there were conflicts.
His mother described him as "a loving, giving young man with a heart as big as the world."
His sister, Erin Crooks, said she has struggled to cope with his death.
She said she'd lost her job, her health and her faith in God.
"I lost my spirit for life and most importantly I lost my big brother. My life has been taken from me," she said, holding up a photo of his funeral service for Wright to see as she walked through the courtroom.
Crooks left behind a pregnant fiancee, Schyla Washington, who gave birth to a little girl almost two months after the killing.
Hurchel Crooks struggled to read his statement, as Wright sat listening with his chin on his hands.
He said the hardest realization is that his brother will never have the chance to know or bring up his two-year-old daughter, who was born after Crooks's death.
"My beautiful niece Damani will never hear her Dad's voice saying 'I love you,"' Crooks told the court.
"She will never tell him where it hurts, or how was school today. ... None of those things, never, ever."
