A man convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of 26-year-old Alex Knatchbell has been sentenced to life in prison without eligibility for parole for 25 years.
Damien Medwedrich appeared to nod slightly as Justice Veronica Jackson handed him the mandatory sentence for first-degree murder, in a Victoria courtroom on Monday.
Medwedrich lured Knatchbell to Humpback Road in Langford on Jan. 20, 2020, under the guise of buying drugs from him. Instead, Medwedrich shot Knatchbell 12 times, Jackson determined when she found Medwedrich guilty of first-degree murder after a judge-alone trial.
A motive was not put forward at trial.
In an emotional victim impact statement, Knatchbell’s mother described how her family has been torn apart by his murder.
“Our family has lost a son, a brother; a sweet childhood for my girls turned dark, a marriage ended, a life gone, a life not able to start,” Cheryl Chalifour said, facing Medwedrich as she read her statement.
Chalifour said she was expecting her son for dinner on Jan. 21, 2020, to celebrate her birthday. Instead, police came to her workplace.
“This has forever changed my birthday. It’s now the day I was told my son was dead,” she said. “Darkness closed in that day. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I had to run, but I didn’t know where.”
Chalifour described months of being unable to sleep and struggling to eat, and of crying during her hour-long commute from Sooke to Victoria each day as she passed the road where her son was killed.
The COVID-19 pandemic began shortly after Knatchbell’s death, forcing the family to grieve in isolation, she said.
“Our family had never experienced such anger in the past. We had a peaceful home, but now grief was showing up in anger in the spring of 2021 with many family yelling and screaming matches in our house,” she said.
The pain of losing her son will never end, she said.
Knatchbell’s younger sister, Katarina Chalifour, who was 12 when her brother was killed, told the court her “childhood died on that day.”
“All the evil in the world that my parents had protected me from had arrived and forced me to see the world for what it truly is,” she said.
Katarina moved to Kamloops to live with an aunt because being close to the site where her brother was killed was too painful, she said.
“This pain, emptiness and loneliness will never go away. My family and I have learned to deal with pain, but it will never leave. My mental health crumbled as I tried to wrap my head around how someone could ever murder Alex,” she said.
Asked by Jackson if he had anything he wanted to say, Medwedrich declined, responding: “No, you guys probably don’t want me to.”
The court heard during trial that Knatchbell’s body was found by first responders about 11:35 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2020, slumped in the driver’s seat of his Nissan Pathfinder, which had crashed into a tree and was blocking Humpback Road. He had been shot in the arm, neck and torso and died from multiple gunshot wounds.
Medwedrich was arrested 10 days after the shooting in Prince George with the murder weapon.
The guilty verdict relied on a video taken by a key Crown witness that captured Medwedrich speaking on the phone after the shooting.
In the video, Medwedrich said, “I did it, and then he [expletive] crashed the tree, crashed the car into the tree,” and, “I didn’t get any money out of him, but like, yo, it’s done. Done. Done.”
Jackson found those statements confirmed the plan was to murder Knatchbell and the plan had been accomplished.
