Judge says 'colonization' a reason Indigenous man gets reduced sentence for choking a toddler
Warning: This story describes incidents of child abuse.
A 33-year-old Indigenous B.C. man who choked and kicked his girlfriend’s “vulnerable and defenceless” two-year-old son last summer has been sentenced to six months in prison for two separate assaults, both of which were captured by a nanny cam in the child’s room.
The Crown had asked for just one year behind bars, while defence counsel sought a conditional sentence of two years less a day to be served in the community.
In her recently published sentencing decision , Provincial Court of B.C. judge Temara Golinsky said that while the man “was not raised with a traditional upbringing,” doesn’t have status and neither he “nor his “immediate family were impacted by state actions such as residential schools, even the dissociation with one’s past and cultural heritage is a negative consequence of colonization.”
As such, his Indigeneity was given some weight as a mitigating factor when she gave him concurrent six-month sentences on charges of choking and assault earlier this month.
The man, referred to only as K.J.M. due to a publication ban to protect the child’s identity, pleaded guilty to both charges and expressed remorse during a two-day sentencing hearing in an unnamed provincial courtroom earlier this year.
According to The Crown, the now four-year-old boy escaped “serious long-term” consequences from the assaults, which Golinksky said was “due to good fortune, not K.J.M.’s actions.”
At the same time, she said, “violence against the toddler, when he was so young, will have an inevitable and long-term impact.”
“Violence is a known adverse childhood experience,” she explained. “The extent of the impact is unknown, but I have no trouble finding that there will have been an impact.”
At the time of the June 2025 assaults, K.J.M. had been living with the mother of the toddler, then 28 months old, and her daughter for about a year.
“He helped to care for the children when the mother was unavailable or even, as it appears from time to time, unwilling,” Golinsky wrote, noting he told pre-sentence report writers that their relationship was “awful,” largely due to her alleged infidelity, and that he felt she was using him for money and childcare.
The man also complained to the two authors that the child “was difficult to parent,” would beat his sister and “smear his s— on the wall”, often with no behavioural correction from his mother.
On occasion, however, “the child would be locked in a bedroom as a punishment for their behaviour and at night,” so he wouldn’t interrupt them.
K.J.M. “did not express any concern with locking a toddler in a room for extended periods of time while unsupervised by an adult,” they wrote.
So it was on the evening of June 13 that K.J.M. said he had put the child in a time-out while the mother was away.
In the video evidence, the child, wearing only a diaper, is seated on the floor near his bedroom door when it opens, striking him on the shoulder and “rolling him back and away from the door.”
“K.J.M. stepped into the room and used his foot to kick and move the child away from the door, rolling him into the centre of the room,” the judge described.
“He then bent down and pushed his hand on the front of the child’s neck, pressing him into the carpet. He squeezed the child’s neck for a moment while the child was screaming. K.J.M. yelled, ‘Get away from the f—ing door,’ and then released his grip and left the room, closing the door behind him. The child can be heard crying while crawling back to sit at the closed door.”
A video captured two days later showed the second vicious assault on the innocent child.
In it, the boy, again dressed only in a diaper, is seated on his bed crying quietly to himself and flinches as K.J.M. opens the door and strides into the room to stand next to the bed.
“He immediately squared his stance and then kicked the child once in the face or forehead with his bare foot, causing the child to fall onto his back,” Golinksy wrote. “He yelled something at the child, then stormed out of the room and closed the door behind him. The child continued to lie there on his back and can be heard crying until the video ends a few seconds later.”
It wasn’t until the mother noticed a scrape on her son and reviewed the nanny cam footage that she learned of the assaults and alerted authorities.
K.J.M. acknowledged his wrongdoing in both instances, but told the pre-sentence report authors that the child had been “screaming or freaking out” because he’d been punished. Golinsky, however, said the audio from the videos makes it clear the toddler “was doing neither in the seconds leading up to either of the assaults.”
Furthermore, “there is no evidence or suggestion by K.J.M. that he returned on either occasion to check on the well-being of the child or to try to comfort the child,” the judge wrote.
Because his offences were “of such gravity and his moral culpability” was so high, Golinsky dismissed the suggestion of a conditional sentence and ordered jail time.
In weighing the sentence duration, she considered the violent nature of the assaults by a caregiver and the child’s vulnerability, particularly in his own home and bedroom, as aggravating factors. The judge also noted the “assaults cannot be characterized as momentary lapses of judgment” because K.J.M. came from elsewhere in the house and “had at least a fraction of time to measure or consider his response.”
“If he didn’t have the time or wherewithal to measure his response the first time, there is no doubt he would have had that opportunity to do so before the second assault,” the decision reads.
“If he had known the first assault was a mistake, as he stated to the report writers, then it is aggravating that he assaulted the toddler again.”
In addition to K.J.M.’s Indigenous ancestry, the judge said other mitigating factors that supported a shorter sentence than requested by the Crown included his guilty plea, his lack of criminal record, his remorse and the long-term effects of a traumatic brain injury from a 2013 ATV accident.
“With that in mind, I do not find that his traumatic brain injury alone could be determined to be a driving or primary factor in his violent behaviour,” Golinsky said. “As the doctor concluded, it is reasonable for the Court to find that it was the toxic combination of several factors, including the brain injury, that brought K.J.M. to assault the child.”
With no credit for time served, he’ll spend the entire six months incarcerated, after which he’ll face 18 months of probation upon release under various conditions.
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