Two men convicted of manslaughter in the stabbing death of a man they didn’t know in Nanaimo’s Maffeo Sutton Park were both given eight-year prison sentences Wednesday.
At the pair’s sentencing in Nanaimo, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Robin Baird said Aiden Bell and Mark Jayden Harrison, both 21, engaged in “utterly brainless and lethal thuggery” in Fred Parsons’ death in 2022.
Baird noted that the maximum sentence for manslaughter is life and the usual range is four to 15 years. Cases, he said, can range from “near accident” to “near murder,” but Parsons’ death was much closer to the latter.
“There is nothing to be likened to an accident in what happened here,” he said. “At the very least, the violence here was planned, intentional and extreme.”
A sentence under eight years for either Bell or Harrison “would be demonstrably unfit,” he said.
Harrison could serve less time once credit for the 895 days he has already spent in custody is taken into account. Bell was under house arrest.
Baird noted that it hasn’t been conclusively determined whether Bell or Harrison inflicted the stab wound that killed Parsons — he was stabbed once in the chest, just below his clavicle — but said they’re both “equally responsible and liable for killing Mr. Parsons.”
Both men have blamed the other for the stabbing, Baird said.
Parsons, 29, died after he was attacked with bear spray and a knife by Bell and Harrison in September 2022 while in the park’s playground with friends.
The Crown had argued that Bell and Harrison had been threatening people prior to the attack. When the two went to the park and came across Parsons and his friends, they confronted them.
Baird described Parsons as “a vulnerable person suffering from developmental disorders, a totally innocent bystander who had done neither of them any wrong or injury.”
Parsons died within half an hour of the attack, he said.
He said that Bell and Harrison both present an “enduring danger” to the public and pose a significant risk to reoffend.
A hefty sentence had to be imposed to register the court’s strong condemnation of their “terrible transgression of the most basic human standards of decency,” Baird said.
The men also caused “grave insult and damage” to the entire Nanaimo community, Baird said, and their statements of remorse came only near the end of the court proceedings.
“There’s an already urgent and rapidly growing concern in Nanaimo about random acts of violence, and abuse and degradation of public spaces by extreme forms of antisocial behaviour,” he said.
He said that both men had “disadvantaged backgrounds” and mental-health issues, and Harrison was the subject of a Gladue report — done for offenders of Indigenous heritage.
Harrison also has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, while Bell has a severe form of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). But Baird said none of the factors in their lives justified a lower sentence than the one issued.
What happened to Parsons was “random, severe, unprovoked and inexcusable,” and has been devastating to Parsons’ family and friends, Baird said.
