GAMETI/RAE LAKES - A Gameti man has been sentenced to seven years in prison for beating his spouse to death.

Terry James Vital, 35, originally charged with second-degree murder in the death of his common-law wife, 31-year-old Alice Black, reached a plea bargain with the Crown and instead pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Supreme Court in Gameti Nov. 22. He was given credit for time already served while he was in custody awaiting the hearing, meaning he has five-and-a-half-years left to serve.

Many in the small Tlicho community - of 280 people - attended the legal proceedings at the community centre, including a class of high school students.

Gameti Chief Eddie Chocolate said it was important to the community to witness Vital's day in court, although he said many now feel Vital "got away with murder."

"Some elders were saying, 'if he only gets five-and-a-half-years, that's not right. He killed a person,'" Chocolate said. "That's how they're thinking now and it's not good for the community. The community needs to heal but when you get a sentence like this the community's saying 'Where's the justice?'"

Vital was previously convicted of assaulting Black - a mother of seven - in incidents dating back to 1999 before her death on Feb. 27, 2009. An autopsy showed she died of blunt force trauma to the head - a result of several head injuries.

Black's parents, Joe and Lucy, attended the hearing and Alice's two sisters expressed their disappointment after the judge read out the sentence in court. Twice during the hearing, Joe Black got up and hugged Vital.

Alice's brother, Jimmy, said his father has a "soft heart" and that the rest of the family didn't agree with his show of forgiveness.

"He's very sensitive to these types of things, so he felt very sorry for the guy - he felt pity for him," Jimmy Black said of his father, who speaks mainly in his Tlicho language.

"That wasn't really fair to me, because if I was there I wouldn't have allowed that."

He said Vital's sentence is too lenient a punishment for taking his sister's life.

"Elsewhere in the world, any man that commits these kinds of crimes would be held for life, or maybe 20 to 30 years," he said. "We're talking about the life that he took."

"That short period of time is nothing to this guy. He can be walking around in another community and commit another crime like this," he added.

But he said his sister's memory lives on.

"I remember her as kind, gentle and easygoing," he said. "She's still with us, just the way that family should be - we were kind to each other, we shared so many things together."

Chief Chocolate said he knows some people blame the community for Alice's death, especially since, Chocolate acknowledged, some residents helped hide Vital when police put out a warrant for his arrest last year. Vital still has a lot of friends in the community, Chocolate said, but he emphasized that other residents are not to blame for Alice's death, the first murder in Gameti in more than a decade.

"It's not the fault of the community," he said. "We were devastated when this happened."

He described Alice as a quiet person and a good mother.

"She didn't talk much and kept to herself but she was a very, very good person. She didn't get mad at anybody and she did all good things for her kids and for her friends," Chocolate said.

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