Davidee Nowdlak’s killer guilty of second-degree murder

A 17-year-old Iqaluit youth knew what he was doing when he kicked and battered Davidee Nowdlak’s head so hard that Nowdlak never recovered, Justice Earle Johnson said this week in finding the young man guilty of second-degree murder.

“There is no reasonable doubt in my mind that he knew that the blows he was inflicting on the victim were likely to cause death and was reckless whether death ensued or not,” Johnson said in his judgement, which rejected nearly all arguments made earlier by the youth’s lawyers.

Dressed in a charcoal-grey suit and black tie, the broad-shouldered young man displayed no emotion as he stood in court, flanked by two lawyers, to hear the verdict.

On July 13, 2002, when he was 17, the youth confronted Davidee Nowdlak, a frail man of 47, on the street near Iqaluit’s 300-block of houses.

He knocked Nowdlak to the ground with a single blow. One eyewitness said the older man fell backwards, bounced a couple of times and stopped moving. Then the youth, stepping backwards and forwards, kicked Nowdlak in the face numerous times.

A bystander yelled at the youth to stop, called for an ambulance on his cell phone, and watched the youth smash the bottom end of a glass coke bottle onto Nowdlak’s forehead and run away.

Nowdlak, a former legal aid worker for Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik and a former Iqaluit town councilor, never regained consciousness.

Soon after, a doctor in Ottawa concluded that Nowdlak would spend what was left of his life in a “persistent vegetative state.” On Aug. 2, 2002, Nowdlak was flown back to the Baffin Regional Hospital. On Aug. 6, after his family agreed to withhold aggressive medical treatment, Nowdlak died.

To find the young man guilty of second-degree murder, Johnson first had to decide who was legally responsible for causing Nowdlak’s death. He found the head injuries inflicted during the beating led directly to Nowdlak’s coma, and therefore to the medical complications — including a lung infection — that eventually killed him in hospital.

Then he had to decide if the youth was too drunk to know what he was doing, leading to a verdict of manslaughter, or sober enough to know that his blows could lead to Nowdlak’s death, leading to a verdict of second-degree murder.

He based his finding not on theoretical evidence given by medical experts, but on the youth’s actions, and on eyewitnesses. Those eyewitnesses heard the young man curse at one witness for calling the police and then say that Nowdlak had stolen a carving from his father’s shack many years before.

Johnson used this to conclude that the youth did what he did with “a single-mindedness of purpose” and “an operating mind that was determined to inflict maximum bodily harm to the victim,” and found him guilty of second-degree murder.

“His emotions were no doubt inflamed by alcohol, but his mind was working,” Johnson said.

The young man was charged and tried as a young person under the Youth Justice Act. His name, and any information that might identify him, may not be published or broadcast.

His next court appearance is scheduled for Nov. 3, when lawyers will talk about when to set a date for his sentencing hearing. Johnson has ordered a pre-sentence report.