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Victim’s family frustrated by sentence for man who encouraged suicide

The family of an Ontario woman who committed suicide at the urging of an American online predator reacted with anger and confusion Wednesday as the man who encouraged her to take her life was sentenced to less than a year behind bars.

TORONTO — The family of an Ontario woman who committed suicide at the urging of an American online predator reacted with anger and confusion Wednesday as the man who encouraged her to take her life was sentenced to less than a year behind bars.

Nadia Kajouji’s brother and mother both decried the sentence handed down to William Melchert-Dinkel by a Minnesota judge, saying it didn’t reflect the severity of his offences.

“You know how they say ’the punishment fits the crime?’ It doesn’t have that feel on this one,” Marc Kajouji said.

“If he had committed a credit card fraud and stole thousands, millions of dollars, would he have done more jail time? That’s the one thing I kind of find frustrating.”

Nadia Kajouji’s mother Deborah Chevalier, who had called for Melchert-Dinkel to be “punished to the full extent of the law,” said she was “disappointed” with the relatively light jail term.

Chevalier attended the sentencing hearing, where she delivered an emotional statement that drew tears from Melchert-Dinkel.

“When Nadia died, the best parts of me died with her,” Chevalier said.

“What William Melchert-Dinkel did was vile, offensive and most importantly, illegal.”

Melchert-Dinkel, 48, was convicted in March of aiding in Nadia’s suicide as well as that of 32-year-old Mark Drybrough of Coventry, England.

Drybrough hanged himself in 2005 after receiving instructions from Melchert-Dinkel, including details on what kind of rope to purchase.

Kajouji, an 18-year-old student at Carleton University in Ottawa, jumped into a frozen river in 2008 after having several conversations with Melchert-Dinkel. Transcripts of their online chats revealed he tried to encourage Kajouji to hang herself as well.

Melchert-Dinkel posed as a suicidal female nurse in both cases, a tactic court documents show he used frequently.

Prosecutors said Melchert-Dinkel was obsessed with suicide and addicted to seeking out potential victims online.

They told court he would enter into false suicide pacts with his victims and offer detailed instructions on how people could take their own lives.

According to court documents, Melchert-Dinkel, a former nurse from the southern Minnesota town of Faribault, told police he did it for the “thrill of the chase.”

He acknowledged participating in online chats about suicide with up to 20 people and entering into fake suicide pacts with about 10, half of whom he believed killed themselves.

Defence lawyer Terry Watkins had argued Melchert-Dinkel’s actions didn’t cause his victims’ deaths and has said he plans to appeal the conviction on free speech grounds. At the sentencing hearing, he said his client suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, depression and obsessive compulsive disorders.

Marc Kajouji disagreed.

“He could have easily encouraged life instead of encouraging death,” he said. “He was in a very unique situation, and he’s saying inevitably she would have taken her own life. Well, maybe if the tones of the conversation that he had the opportunity to have with her were different, that wouldn’t have been the case.”

Judge Thomas Neuville, who presided over the case alone, ruled that Melchert-Dinkel was directly involved in the suicides but was not the soul reason for their deaths.

He compared Melchert-Dinkel’s conduct to stalking in handing down the jail term, which was considerably less than the maximum 15 years he could have received for each count under a rarely used Minnesota law.

Neuville structured the sentence so that Melchert-Dinkel would serve an initial 320 days, then be freed. Over the next 10 years, he would have to serve two-day spells in jail on the anniversaries of his victims’ deaths.

If he violates the terms of his 15-year probation, he must serve 6.5 years in prison.

Marc Kajouji fears the sentence will not deter other online predators from committing similar offences, adding the outcome has motivated him to step up his activism in the field of suicide prevention.

“You can only have so many hush-hush conversations about suicide,” he said. “It’s got to be out in the open. Just like we were afraid to talk about civil rights and breast cancer and aids and many different things. If we don’t talk about it, it’s not going to change.”

- With files from the Associated Press