B.C. man sentenced to 18 months for supplying Carson Crimeni with fatal dose of MDMA

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A teenage drug dealer was one of dozens of young people who sat by as 14-year-old Carson Crimeni grew delirious at a Langley, B.C., skatepark after taking what would become a fatal dose of MDMA, but he was the only one who supplied the boy with the drugs – triple the amount he was originally seeking.

For overserving the boy with a criminally reckless number of capsules, he was sentenced Thursday in B.C. Supreme Court to 18 months in prison for manslaughter.

Justice Kathleen Ker ruled that the offender, who can’t be named because he committed the crime as a 17-year-old in 2019, was not culpable for failing to intervene and call 911 as Carson’s health deteriorated in a setting she likened to the “21st-century equivalent of a scene from the Lord of the Flies.”

But, the judge said while reading her judgment aloud, he gave the boy a total of 10 capsules of MDMA – the equivalent of a gram – when he wanted to buy only three caps, each containing 0.1 grams. Carson “parachuted” the second, larger dose he was sold, the judge said, meaning he swallowed all the capsules at once.

“Many others failed to intervene as well, but it was [the offender] who supplied the drugs and had experience in taking those drugs at the time of the offence,” said Justice Ker, who sentenced the offender to a further year and a half of conditional supervision in his Fraser Valley community after he serves his prison time for manslaughter.

“[The offender] is responsible for Carson’s death. He will have to live with this act for the rest of his life.”

Aron Crimeni, Carson’s dad, said outside court he was disappointed the offender did not receive the maximum sentence of two years in prison. Mr. Crimeni added none of the 30 or so young people at the park that summer day will face any criminal penalties for filming his son becoming delirious and uploading these videos to Snapchat. Nor will the smaller group of youths who hid Carson from police after a parent who viewed one of these macabre videos called 911, Mr. Crimeni told a scrum of reporters as tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.

“It’s definitely questionable, the legality, on that: to hide somebody who’s in trouble from help, because if the police had found him earlier it might have made a difference,” he said.

Carson was pronounced dead close to midnight at a local hospital on Aug. 7, 2019, after being found barely breathing in a ditch near a baseball diamond by another group of teens. Early that afternoon, he had taken a bus to a nearby skatepark with a friend, then consumed MDMA while hanging out with a group of older boys he mistook for friends. They proceeded to shoot videos and taunt him as he became increasingly manic and delirious in the hours leading up to his death.

RCMP Superintendent Adrian Marsden told The Globe and Mail the manslaughter case was the only possible crime his force could prove after dozens of Mounties spent years investigating the distressing death, which shocked Langley and made international headlines in August, 2019.

“There really hasn’t been a case similar to this at all – even though we reviewed the circumstances at length and spent years in the investigation, there really wasn’t an appropriate offence that we could look to apply that to,” Supt. Marsden said. “At the end of the day, it really came down to the accountability of the person that provided the drugs and allowed it to happen.”

Justice Ker said she could not find a roughly equivalent case to inform her on how to punish one teen for selling another a fatal dose of a Schedule 1 narcotic.

The Crown had requested the maximum prison time for a young offender of two years with a conditional sentence of a year in the community. The defence had asked for a year to a year and a half of prison time after the young man pleaded guilty to manslaughter this spring and avoided a trial.

Justice Ker said one mitigating factor in her decision was that the defendant appeared to have turned his life around after the death that shocked his community. The court heard his single mother had to sell their home in Langley because of threats made to her son and move further east into the Fraser Valley. Since Carson’s overdose, the offender had also held down a steady landscaping job for two years – as attested in a glowing letter of support from his boss – and is several credits shy of graduating from high school, the court heard.

Justice Ker said the offender’s life took a turn at 15 when two boys he thought were friends viciously attacked him at a party, leaving him unconscious in a snowbank with a head injury. After that, she said, his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder worsened along with his memory and he was prone to outbursts of anger. He soon began heavily using psychedelics such as magic mushrooms and LSD and experimenting with hard drugs such as cocaine and Oxycontin, gradually becoming addicted as a form of self-medication to deal with the trauma of the attack, Justice Ker said.

Darrel Crimeni, who tracked sirens in the neighbourhood that night to find his grandson barely breathing in the park, said he and Aron Crimeni have heard from Mounties that some of the dozens of teens at the skatepark have expressed remorse for their actions or inaction. But, he said, his family has not been approached by any of these people directly to apologize for not helping his grandson, whom he described as being “his world.”