It was a delusion fueled by drugs that caused a young man to kill a 79-year-old woman two years ago, according to statements made in court last week.
The details of Julien Levasseur’s drug use on the day he attacked Charan Dhandwar were presented at the 24-year-old’s sentencing hearing held in New Westminster provincial court last Thursday.
Dhandwar was killed on June 3, 2015. She had been visiting a friend’s house and was walking home along Eighth Avenue near Lord Tweedsmuir Elementary School around 6:30 p.m. when Levasseur confronted her. He was in what both Crown counsel and the defence attorney called a drug-induced psychosis when he mistook Dhandwar as a “bad entity that needed to be slayed.”
The beating Levasseur delivered while high on LSD and MDMA, a mixture known as candy flipping, was “prolonged, brutal and vicious,” Crown counsel Satinder Sidhu said.
Dhandwar never fought back. She died quickly, according to the medical examiner’s report, but Levasseur continued his attack, motivated by a delusion in which he believed humanity was trapped on earth by an evil force.
When officers arrived on the scene, Levasseur was erratic. He was wearing only boxer shorts and pacing back and forth a short distance from where the body lay.
Dhandwar’s death has left her family broken, her grandson Ryan Dhillon told the court in his victim impact statement.
“Innocence was met with violence that day,” he said, adding her death has left a void in his family.
It’s an absence, he remarked, as “conspicuous as her presence once was.”
Dhillon was one of a dozen family members who gathered in the court room last week. They listened as the Crown and defence laid out their arguments for Levasseur’s sentencing. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter at a hearing last year, and the Crown is recommending he serve eight to 10 years in prison while the defence is requesting a shorter sentence of five to seven years.
According to the defence, Levasseur has the potential to be a contributing member of society. Without the drugs, this incident would never have happened, Levasseur’s attorney argued, and the Crown agreed.
Before the incident, Levasseur was working full time. He graduated from high school with a 95 per cent average, and following a year at Vancouver Community College, he completed a two-year civil engineering program at BCIT where he received awards for his hard work and impressive marks, according to the defence, and he continues to work on his studies while in prison.
Speaking to Dhandwar’s family and the community at-large during the sentencing hearing, Levasseur apologized for the “horror and suffering” his actions have caused.
“A life was lost on what should have been a carefree afternoon,” he told the court.
“I did one of the most terrible things ever.”
Levassaur said that had the roles been reversed and his grandmother had been killed, he would feel the same way Dhandwar’s family felt, adding he was prepared to accept the consequences of his actions.
“Given his character and background, it (the sentence) should be at the lower end,” his attorney argued.
Sidhu, however, wants a sentence that reflects “the gravity of the offence.”
She noted Levasseur was a recreational drug user at the time of the incident, and on two previous occasions, he had experienced severe delusions while using hallucinogenic drugs.
“(Levasseur) made a deliberate and planned choice to take these drugs knowing the effect it had on him in the past,” she argued.
The judge is scheduled to make her decision on Monday, Jan. 30 at 2 p.m.
