In a Michael Jackson-ized world, where strangers grieve celebrities as though flesh-and-blood and idiots speak of achieving closure before the dead are cold, Stefanie Rengel's family stands almost as alone as she was when she was slain.
Dignified and private, Stefanie's nearest and dearest Monday delivered what in Section 722 of the Criminal Code of Canada are called "victim impact statements."
These are designed to help judges determine sentences by detailing the harm done or loss suffered by victims of crime.
Rarely have the devastating effects been laid so bare, with such horrifying eloquence.
One by one, Stefanie's brother Ian Rengel, maternal grandmother Mary Fraser and mother Patricia Hung walked to the witness box to read their statements; Stefanie's father, Adolfo Rengel, had his best friend, Alan Clark, read his.
Together, the statements reveal a tightly knit family almost rent asunder by the violence done to Stefanie, its members trying not to retreat into isolation (but sometimes doing it anyway) as they wrestle with the magnitude of their loss.
It was on the first day of 2008 that Stefanie, just 14 and bright and beautiful, was lured from the family home, stabbed six times and left to die. An oafish teenage boy who can be identified only as D.B. was the actual killer, and this spring pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.
Now 19, he will be sentenced this fall.
But the controller of the deadly game, the jealous mastermind who had never met Stefanie but nonetheless wanted her "dead in coffin" and who inundated the boy with demands that he kill her, was the pale girl, now 17, known as M.T.
She was convicted of first-degree murder this March, and it is her sentencing hearing now under way.
What follows is some of what Ontario Superior Court Judge Ian Nordheimer heard Monday.
Ian Rengel went first, a splendid handsome boy of 13 with lovely manners that most days fail to conceal the mischief within. He wore a suit and tie, as he did throughout the trial.
He spoke so slowly that I imagined his statement must be several pages long; it was but four paragraphs.
He was the only one (besides the family nanny) who was home the night D.B. tricked Stephanie into coming out of the house, and blames himself.
"Why didn't I look out and see her dying in the snow?" he asked, breaking into tears. "I could have told her I loved her and that everything was going to be fine if she could just hold on a little longer."
He spoke of his little brothers.
The littlest, only three, no longer remembers her. For Patrick, in the sweetness of his babyhood, Stefanie has been dead longer than she was alive. He "only talks about her in heaven," Ian said. The six-year-old, Eric, "is scared so easily now. He worries every time I leave the house and feels panicked until I get home." About to start high school in September, Ian said, "I don't know who to trust, who to fear, who to make friends with so I probably just won't. I can't trust anybody."
Mary Fraser, Stephanie's grandma, was next.
Tiny and pretty, she was kind enough to reach out to M.T.'s family: "There is no doubt [they are]suffering in ways we can only imagine, and we are truly sorry for that, yet in spite of the fact that M. appears to have been raised in a loving home, she has managed, somehow, to reach the age of 17 without the slightest regard for the intrinsic value of human life…her coldness is frightening..."
At trial, Mrs. Fraser correctly noted, M.T. was given "every possible courtesy, respect and concession…There was no trial for Stefanie, no jury, no judge, no solicitous defence, no careful weighing of evidence, no concessions because of her youth, no pity, no six-hour-long closing argument…just a brutal, calculated, cold-blooded execution and afterwards, a bizarre re-enactment and a sexual reward, freely given, for a job well done.
"God help us all."
Mr. Rengel's friend, Mr. Clark, read Mr. Rengel's statement, where he spoke of the worst day of his life and how "Nobody knows how I feel, the anger and hatred I have for the people who took Stefanie away from our family."
Patricia Hung was last.
She composed herself visibly, took a drink of water, looked directly at M.T. in the prisoner's box for the first of several times, and began: "There are many moral lessons we learn growing up, but none is more primordial than knowing that killing is wrong.
"If by 15 years old, that basic moral principle has not been learned, and something so transient and fickle as teenage jealousy can elicit murder, as though this were a crime of little consequence, then no amount of maturing or rehabilitation is going to instill that principle."
With the slightest chill in the weather, Ms. Hung said, she is reminded of Stefanie's last moments: "Freezing, in an agony of pain, shock and terror, bleeding from six separate stab wounds, drowning in her own blood as her lungs filled up, suffocating, gasping for air with no one but a stranger to offer her what help he could."
A Toronto Police officer, Ms. Hung said of her career. "Simply, I don't have one…I used to love my job and was proud of my work, and now I don't know how I'm going to ever do it again because simply, I'm afraid."
This fear, which she said may sound reasonable considering the trauma the family has suffered, is "multifaceted and devastating."/
She wakes every night in terror - nightmares of attacks against Stefanie or the boys - but is afraid of taking anything lest she sleep through a break-in and be "too medicated to protect my family."
She is afraid of not being strong for her surviving children, afraid of burdening her own parents though she longs for her mother's comfort.
The rage is exhausting: "I want to scream at the top of my lungs, want to stop pretending all the time, stop having to just get by, and I want to know happiness again. I want to stop over-reacting when I feel like an injustice has been committed against anyone I care about..."
Mostly, Ms. Hung is afraid to speak about Stefanie too much "for fear I will lose control of myself and tumble so far down into the depths of despair I won't be able to pull myself out.
"I have wanted so many times to not be alive, to stab myself and feel exactly what she felt, an incomprehensible need to experience her pain," she said. But she has other children, other responsibilities, and so I go on."
And that is what is left for them, she said, to try to find a way to go on.
At the end of this exercise, which left virtually everyone who heard it weeping, the girl M.T. was handed a tissue by her lawyer and dabbed daintily at her eyes.
The hearing continues Tuesday.