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Sam Eves’s killer gets four years

Justice is not being served, father says in Facebook message

A Squamish family is not happy with the way the justice system has dealt with the man who stabbed their teenage son to death.

Ontario native Ander Walker-Huria, 21, was sentenced Thursday to four years for the March 2007 death of Alistair (Sam) Eves in Squamish's Valleycliffe neighbourhood. In a previous court appearance Walker-Huria pled guilty to manslaughter after initially being charged with second-degree murder.

But while he received a four-year sentence, Walker-Huria won't be spending that long in prison. He's spent the last two years and two months in custody, and under the two-for-one credit system that applies to accused held prior to conviction, he won't serve any further time for the death of Eves.

Walker-Huria will, however, be serving 10 months as part of a 14-month sentence for a series of charges he faced in Ontario.

Walker-Huria was accused of stabbing Eves to death at a March 2007 gathering on North Ridge Drive where teens had been drinking. Eves and Walker-Huria had apparently gotten into a verbal altercation that later escalated into violence.

Police arrived on the scene as Eves lay dying in the driveway, his stomach ripped "completely open" according to reports at the time.

Walker-Huria was arrested on a forest service road after a 13-hour manhunt that included roadblocks and a police helicopter.

In a court appearance on May 5, defence lawyer Martin Peters painted Walker-Huria as a "troubled young man" with a history of substance abuse and mental health issues. He had exhibited anti-social behaviour dating back to the age of 12.

Up to the age of 10 he was known as a shy child and a good student but that changed when he moved from Toronto to Barrie, Ont. He didn't adjust well to school there and was a "hyperactive child" around this time. He tried to hang himself at age 11 after a close friend died of an aneurysm.

The Crown sought a five-year sentence for Walker-Huria while defence sought three years.

In the years and months since Walker-Huria's arrest, the Eves family has expressed severe frustration with B.C.'s judicial system, with Sam's father, Colin, saying that the system failed his son. Earlier this year he told CTV that Sam "wasn't a priority" for prosecutors because his case had been assigned to various lawyers.

The Crown hadn't interviewed any witnesses until two weeks before a preliminary trial, according to the CTV report.

In a Facebook message written May 5, Colin Eves said the Canadian justice system is "fundamentally corrupt" and that justice itself is simply not being served.

Jacqueline Hunter, a friend of the Eves family when they lived in Quesnel, said in an interview last week that the sentence wasn't just.

"You can compare that to as many previous cases of manslaughter in the history of Canada as you want to," she said. "I don't think that was very harsh on him. I think (the judge) was letting him off rather easy considering some of the things he has done in the past."

Walker-Huria has a criminal record dating back to 2006, when he faced 12 charges for offences committed all on the same day. Among them, he was charged with three counts of breaking and entering, theft of property worth over $5,000 and operating a vehicle while impaired - all while breaching a probation order.

In a 13 th charge he failed to appear for a court hearing.

Thursday's sentencing laid out the 14-month jail term for all these offences.