CALGARY - The Crown and defence agree that a Calgary man convicted of killing his five-year-old grandson should get significant prison time.
Court of Queen's Bench Justice Richard Neufeld found Allan Perdomo Lopez guilty last month of manslaughter.
Prosecutor Vicki Faulkner has suggested a sentence of 12 to 15 years because Perdomo Lopez has a high level of moral culpability.
Defence lawyer Darren Mahoney is suggesting six to eight years in prison.
Court heard that the boy, Emilio Perdomo, was sent to Canada from Mexico in 2015 so he could have a better life.
But five months after his arrival in Calgary, Emilio was taken to hospital unconscious with a traumatic brain injury.
He didn't wake up and died eight days later.
"The offender spoke of Emilio and his death as a demon, as something that needed to be cleansed from his home," Faulkner said in sentencing submissions Tuesday.
"He was a five-year-old boy."
Emilio's grandmother, with whom the boy lived before he was sent to Canada, said the loss has been devastating.
"We see colleagues of Emilio growing up and we imagine how his life would have been," wrote Marisol Segovia-Alvarez in her victim impact statement, translated in court by an interpreter.
The statement was read aloud in Spanish by her daughter and Emilio's mother, Melody Segovia, at the Canadian embassy in Mexico City and broadcast into the Calgary courtroom.
Segovia-Alvarez described Emilio as a friendly and happy boy who loved music and greeting people on the street.
He told his mother he wanted to buy her a house, she said.
"Time goes by and we feel his absence every time more and more."
The Crown argued that Emilio was subjected to weeks of abuse and submitted photos of scars and bruises all over his body that were in various stages of healing.
During the trial, the Crown played a police recording from the family minivan of Perdomo Lopez tearfully praying in Spanish.
An English transcript of the intercept submitted in court said the man was asking for forgiveness and saying he "didn't want to kill that child.''
The prayer was one of 11 police recordings from the accused's vehicle, home and phone that were presented as evidence.
Mahoney had argued the remark was not a confession and that the Crown cherry-picked segments of the recordings to construct its story.
The offender's wife, Carolina Perdomo, was accused initially in the boy's death, but the Crown stayed a manslaughter charge against her earlier this year.
